But not all the tanks went roaring through. Butch’s didn’t. It broke down beside a small, almost leveled church. And while the driver was trying out a little first-echelon maintenance on the engine, Butch got down, dropped his helmet on a tread guard, and went into the building.
Later he was to assert it was more than coincidence, that something caused the tank to break down and led him into the church. He held no doubt honestly, that he could remember no reasoning — curiosity or even the desire to get in out of the cold — for going inside the tottering structure. Surely it wasn’t devotion, he had shown little enough of that in his life. All he knew, or so he contended, was that he got down from the tank, dropped his helmet, and went in.
Once in the church, he saw nearly total destruction. Nothing was whole. Candle racks were twisted, turned on their sides. One wall had crumbled. On two of the others the Stations of the Cross were burned frames or shattered heaps below the shadow areas from which the plaster had fallen. Against the third wall, the altars stood — or had stood. The main altar was gone, a gaping hole in the wall opening onto a littered yard beyond. One of the side altars was a mound of rubble. Only the right-hand altar still stood, pocked and chipped and peeling. Its statue, God the Father, blackened and broken but still recognizable, stood in its niche, arms outstretched to the faithful — arms without hands, for they had been blasted away. A double amputee, true to the times.
But what held Butch’s attention was a crudely lettered sign, the unknown effort of some dog-face. The sign was hung from the statue’s neck by a rope — the kind that came with the issue shelter-half — and read:
I HAVE NO HANDS BUT YOURS
In one of the late-night sessions I used to have with Butch after I got the assignment to dig into his Crusade he told me of his mental turbulence at that moment. Thoughts tumbled over each other, the new struggling to displace the old. The whole statement burned itself into his consciousness, but the word yours kept repeating itself in his thoughts, a riotous mix of the aural and visual.
He couldn’t recall how long he stood rereading that sign, wholly, in part, word by word (YOURS! YOURS! YOURS!), his mind drawing back from the message like a child avoiding bitter medicine.
Butch said he wrestled there, resisting what he later acknowledged to be a clear challenge. He turned away from the statue and its sign, almost wrenched himself away, telling himself he needed time to think through this new and unbidden experience.
He got it — more input to the later Crusade mythos. As he stepped from the church, a German shell hit his tank, demolished it, killed his crew, and completed the job of reducing the church to tumbled stones and granulated plaster. Butch received a light hit, a piece of metal through his thigh. Light but disabling. Enough to knock him down, put him out, and mark him for an extended period of convalescence at some rear-area hospital. Plenty of time to think.
He awoke in a Belgian hospital managed by a religious order. So it isn’t surprising that the first thing he saw was a crucifix tacked to the wall opposite his bed. At that moment of waking he didn’t know that nuns ran the hospital, and his sight wasn’t too good, so what his tortured mind saw was the cruciform centered in a rosette of light, framed by haze. It was as if he were looking down a long dark tunnel, at the end of which salvation beckoned.
Shutting his eyes didn’t help. This new image was burned behind the lids. That was when, he told me later, he gave himself over to The Message. In that hospital bed, the Hands Crusade was born.
When he at last opened his eyes the room fell into focus and the crucifix was just that — a crucifix on a wall. But this realization didn’t turn him around; The Message had gotten through. Butch de Strange was converted. Born again, as we say nowadays.
He noticed there were others in the hospital room and that a second lieutenant, turned out in a nurse’s crisp whiteness, was standing beside his bed with an oral thermometer.
“You’ll be all right,” she said. “Open up.”
“I know,” he said, and opened up.
That’s how he met Dortia Brand, then a twenty-six-year-old officer and gentlewoman, by Act of Congress, of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. The army medics had taken over the Belgian hospital, which explained Dortia’s presence among the wimples, veils, and flowing skirts.
I can’t believe there was instant communication between Butch and Dortia, some immediate understanding that bound them together in what he saw now to be his work, but they contended that some such thing happened. I prefer to lay whatever link was forged between them as resulting from the long-into-the-night discussions she would later describe as “revelatory.” From the Crusade accounts, they spent those hours hammering out the consequences of The Message and planning the structure of the organization that would bring it to a waiting, war-sickened world.
They started in the States about a year after they both left the army. They had (correctly) assessed the need for the Hands Crusade and the efficacy of The Message, however it was they framed it. Shortly after opening shop they attracted hundreds, then thousands. Their base of operations was right here in Paulsburg, and one day my editor called me in and gave me the assignment.
“Monahan, do you know anything about this Hands Crusade?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“This guy, De Strange. He preaches commitment and service, then sends everyone back to their own church.”
“Is that bad?”
“I don’t know. He may have something up his sleeve. See if there’s an angle.”
That’s how I met De Strange and Dortia. We got along from the first, were on a first-name basis at the start, though I’m not too keen on people calling me Oscar. I had to break off an ongoing exchange of European war stories so I could get around to telling them that my main purpose in being there was to expose the Hands Crusade if I could. Their reaction to that was strange; there wasn’t any. They continued to be warm and congenial and even offered to help me peek into every nook and cranny. I said thanks, I’d find my own nooks and crannies. But I did accept a guided tour of their plant.
It was a quick walk-through because there wasn’t much to it and what there was was incredibly shoddy — a few unpainted offices with furniture that looked like Salvation Army rejects. The only decorations were religious pictures and here and there the official Crusade poster showing the handless God and The Message: I HAVE NO HANDS BUT YOURS. In each office, two or three hungry-looking individuals checked mailing lists, stuffed envelopes, drew up speaking itineraries, and did those things people out to save the world do.
I asked questions and got ready answers. The money came from a handful of well-to-do individuals, just enough to keep the headquarters operational, provide the volunteers with meals that made army K-rations look like something from the kitchens of the Ritz, and finance, by cheapest common carrier, the increasing number of trips De Strange was making.
“It looks clean,” I told my editor.
“How about De Strange and that girl? You know.”
“No.”
I must have sounded defensive because he smiled, overly wisely, I thought. “There’s some payoff, Monahan. Dig.”
“There’s no digging to be done here. Not in Paulsburg. The big rallies are over here. But he goes on the road next week.”
“Follow him,” my editor said, the smile staying.