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<h2>XVIII</h2> <h3>AT RHEIMS</h3> August, 1915. On a beautiful August evening I am hastening in a motor car towards Rheims, one of our martyred towns, where I am hoping to find shelter for the night before continuing my journey to the General Headquarters of another Army. In order to avoid military formalities I wish to enter the town before the sun sets, and it is already too low for my liking. The evening is typical of one of our splendid French summers; the air is exquisitely clear, of a delightful, wholesome warmth, tempered with a light, refreshing breeze. On the hillsides of Champagne the beautiful vines on which the grapes are ripening spread a uniform expanse of green carpet, and there are so many trees, [Pg 178]so many flowers everywhere, gardens in all the villages, and roses climbing up all the walls. To-day the cannon is heard no more, and one would be tempted to forget that the barbarians are there close at hand if there were not so many improvised cemeteries all along the road. Everywhere there are these little graves of soldiers, all alike, which are now to be found from end to end of our beloved France, all along the battle front; their simple crosses of wood are ranged in straight lines as if for a parade, topped, some of them, with a wreath; others still more pathetically with a simple service-cap, red or blue, falling to rags. We salute them as we pass. Among these glorious dead there are some whose kindred will seek them out and bring them back to the province of their birth later, when the barbarians have gone away, while others, less favoured, will [Pg 179]remain there forever until the great final day of oblivion. But what masses of flowers people have already been at pains to plant there for them all. Around their resting-place there is a brave show of all shades of brilliant colour, dahlias, cannas, China asters, roses. Who has undertaken this labour of love? Girls from the nearest villages? Or perhaps even their own brothers-in-arms, who dwell on the outskirts everywhere like invisible subterranean tribes in these casemates, trench shelters, dug-outs of every shape covered over with green branches? This region, you must know, is not very safe, and when we arrive at a section of the road which is too much exposed, a sentinel, especially posted there to give warning, instructs us to leave the high road for a moment, where we should run the risk of being seen and shelled, and to take some sheltered traverse behind the curtains of poplars. [Pg 180]One of my soldier-chauffeurs suddenly turns round to say to me: "Oh look, sir, there is an Arab cemetery. They have put on each grave their little crescents instead of the cross." Here to be sure the humble stelae of white wood are all topped with the crescent of Islam, and this is something of a shock to us in the very heart of France. Poor fellows, who died for our righteous cause, so far from their mosques and their marabouts they sleep, and alas! without facing Mecca, because they who laid them piously to rest did not know that this was to them a requisite of peaceful slumber! But the same profusion of flowers has been brought to them as to our own countrymen, and I need not say that we salute them likewise—a little late, perhaps, for we pass them so rapidly. We reach Rheims just before sunset, and here a sudden sadness chills us. All is [Pg 181]silent and the streets almost deserted. The shops are closed, and some of the houses seem to gape at us with enormous holes in their walls. One of the infrequent wayfarers tells us that at the Hotel Golden Lion, Cathedral Square, we may still be able to find someone to take us in, and soon we are at the very foot of the noble ruin, which is still enthroned as majestically as ever in the midst of the martyred town, dominating everything with its two towers of open stone-work. I stop my car, the sound of whose rolling in such a place seems profanation; the sadness of ruins is intensified here into veritable anguish, and the silence is such that instinctively we begin to talk softly, as if we had already entered the great church that has perished. The Golden Lion—but its panes of glass are broken, the doors stand open, the courtyard is deserted. I send one of my [Pg 182]soldiers there, bidding him call, but not too loudly, in the midst of all this mournful meditation. He returns; he has received no reply and has seen holes in the walls. The house is deserted. We must seek elsewhere. It is twilight. A golden after-glow still lingers around the magnificent summits of the towers, while the base is wrapped in shadow. Oh, the cathedral, the marvellous cathedral! what a work of destruction the barbarians have continued to accomplish here since my pilgrimage of last November. It had ever been a lace-work of stone, and now it is nothing but a lace-work torn in tatters, pierced with a thousand holes. By what miracle does it still hold together? It seems as if to-day the least shock, a breath of wind perhaps, would suffice to cause it to crumble away, to resolve itself, as it were, into scattered atoms. How can it ever be repaired? What scaffolding [Pg 183]could one dare to let lean against those unstable ruins. In an attempt to afford it yet a little protection sandbags have been piled up, mountain high, against the pillars of the porticoes, the same precaution that has been taken in the case of St. Mark's in Venice, of Milan, of all those inimitable masterpieces of past ages which are menaced by the refined culture of Germany. Here the precautions are vain; it is too late, the cathedral is lost, and our hearts are wrung with sorrow and indignation as we look this evening upon this sacred relic of our past, our art, and our faith, in its death throes and its abandonment. Ah, what savages! And to feel that they are still there, close at hand, capable of giving it at any hour its coup de grâce. To bid it farewell, perhaps a last farewell, we will walk around it slowly with solemn tread, in the midst of this deathlike [Pg 184]silence which seems to grow more intense as the light fails. But suddenly, just as we are passing the ruins of the episcopal palace, we hear a prelude of sound, a tremendous, hollow uproar, something like the rumbling of a terrible thunderstorm, near at hand and unceasing. And yet the evening sky is so clear! Ah yes, we were warned, we know whence it comes; it is the bombardment of our heavy artillery, which was expected half an hour after sunset, directed at the barbarians' trenches. This is a change for us from the silence, this cataclysmal music, and it contributes to our walk a different kind of sadness, another form of horror. And we continue to gaze at the wonderful stone carving overhanging us—the bold little arches, the immense pointed arches, so frail and so exquisite. Indeed how does it all still hold together? Up above there are little columns which have lost their [Pg 185]base and remain, as it were, suspended in the air by their capitals. The windows are no more; the lovely rose-windows have been destroyed; the nave has huge fissures from top to bottom. In the twilight the whole cathedral assumes more and more its phantom-like aspect, and that noise which causes everything to vibrate is still increasing. It is a question whether so many vibrations will not bring about the final downfall of those too fragile carvings which hitherto have held on so persistently at such great heights above our heads. Here comes the first wayfarer in that solitude, a well-dressed person. He is hurrying, actually running. "Do not stay there," he shouts to us; "do you not see that they are going to bombard?" "But it is we, the French, who are firing. It is our own artillery. Come, do not run so fast." [Pg 186]"I know very well that it is we, but each time the enemy revenge themselves on the cathedral. I tell you that there will be a rain of shells here immediately. Look out for yourselves." He goes on. So much the better; it was kind of him to warn us, but his jacket and his billy-cock jarred upon the melancholy grandeur of the scene. Where a street opens into the square two girls now appear; they stop and hesitate. Evidently they are aware, these two, that the barbarians have a habit of taking a noble revenge upon the cathedral, and that shells are about to fall. But doubtless they have to cross this square in order to reach their home, to get down into their cellar. Will they have time? They are graceful and pretty, fair, bare-headed, with their hair arranged in simple bands. They gaze into the air with their eyes raised well up towards the [Pg 187]heavens, perhaps to see if death is beginning to pass that way, but more likely to send up thither a prayer. I know not what last brightness of the twilight, in spite of the encroaching gloom, illumines so delightfully their two upturned faces, and they look like saints in stained-glass windows. Both make the sign of the cross, and then they make up their minds, and hand in hand they run across the square. With their religious gestures, their faces expressing anxiety, yet courage too and defiance, they suddenly seem to me charming symbols of the girlhood of France; they run away, indeed, but it is clear that they would remain without fear if there were some wounded man to carry away, some duty to perform. And their flight seems very airy in the midst of this tremendous uproar like the end of the world. We are going away too, for it is wiser. In the streets there are a very few wayfarers [Pg 188]who are running to take shelter, running with their backs hunched up, although nothing is falling yet, like people without umbrellas surprised by a shower. One of them, who nevertheless does not mind stopping, points out to us the last hotel still remaining open, a "perfectly safe" hotel, he says, over there in a quarter of the town where no shell has ever fallen. God forbid that I should dream of laughing at them, or fail to admire as much as it deserves their persistent and calm heroism in remaining here, in defiance of everything, in their beloved town, which is suffering more and more mutilations. But who would not be amused at that instinct which causes the majority of mankind to hunch their backs against hail of whatever description? And then, is it because the air is fresh and soft and it is good to be alive that after the unspeakable heartache at the sight of the cathedral and [Pg 189]the passion verging on tears, a calm of reaction sets in and in that moment everything amuses me? At the end of a quiet street, where the noise of the cannonade is muffled, in the distance, we find the hotel which was recommended to us. "Rooms," says the host, very pleasantly, standing on his doorstep, "oh, as many as you like, the whole hotel if you wish, for you will understand that in times such as these travellers—— And yet as far as shells go you have nothing to fear here." An appalling din interrupts his sentence. All the windows in the front of the house are shivered to fragments, together with tiles, plaster, branches of trees. In his haste to run away and hide he misses the step on the threshold and falls down flat on his face. A dog who was coming along jumps upon him, full of importance, recalling him to order with a [Pg 190]fierce bark. A cat, sprung from I know not where, flies through space like an aerolith, uses my shoulder for a jumping-off place, and is swallowed up by the mouth of a cellar. But words are too tedious for that series of catastrophes, which lasts scarcely as long as two lightning flashes. And they continue to bombard us with admirable regularity, as if timing themselves with a metronome; the wall of the house is already riddled with scars. It is very wrong, I admit, to take these things as a jest, and indeed with me that impression is only superficial, physical, I might say; that which endures in the depth of my soul is indignation, anguish, pity. But at this entry which the Germans made into our hotel, that peaceful spot, with flourish of their great orchestra, in the presence of so many surprises, how retain one's dignity? There is a fair number of little shells, it seems, but no heavy shells; [Pg 191]they travel with their long whistling sound, and burst with a harsh din. "Into the cellar, gentlemen," cries the innkeeper, who has picked himself up unhurt. Apparently there is nothing else to be done. I should have come to that conclusion myself. So I turn round to order in my three soldiers too, who had remained outside to look at a hole made by shrapnel in the body of the car. But upon my word I believe they are laughing, the heartless wretches; and then I can restrain myself no longer, I burst out laughing too. Yes, it is very wrong of us, for presently there will be bloodshed and death. But how resist the humour of it all: the good man fallen flat on his face, the self-importance of the dog, who thought he must put a stop to the situation, and especially the cat, the cat swallowed up by an air-hole after showing us as a supreme exhibition of flight its little hindquarters with its tail in the air. [Pg 192] <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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