TRAGEDY OF RHEIMS
But there is no hieroglyphic for Rheims, no blunting of the
mind at the abominations committed on the cathedral there.
The thing peers upward, maimed and blinded, from
out of the
utter wreckage of the Archbishop's palace on the one side and
dust-heaps of crumbled houses on the other. They shelled, as
they still shell it, with high explosives and with incendiary
shells, so that the statues and the stonework in places are
burned the colour of raw flesh. The gargoyles are smashed;
statues, crockets, and spires tumbled; walls split and torn;
windows thrust out and tracery obliterated. Wherever one
looks at the tortured pile there is mutilation and defilement,
and yet it had never more of a soul than it has to-day.
Inside--("Cover yourselves, gentlemen," said the sacristan,
"this place is no longer consecrated")--everything is swept
clear or burned out from end to end, except two candlesticks
in front of the niche where Joan of Arc's image used to stand.
There is a French flag there now. [And the last time I saw
Rheims Cathedral was in a spring twilight, when the great west
window glowed, and the only lights within were those of
candles which some penitent English had lit in Joan's honour
on those same candlesticks.] The high altar was covered with
floor-carpets; the pavement tiles were cracked and jarred out
by the rubbish that had fallen from above, the floor was
gritty with dust of glass and powdered stone, little twists of
leading from the windows, and iron fragments. Two great doors
had been blown inwards by the blast of a shell in the
Archbishop's garden, till they had bent grotesquely
to the
curve of a cask. There they had jammed. The windows--but the
record has been made, and will be kept by better hands than
mine. It will last through the generation in which the Teuton
is cut off from the fellowship of mankind--all the long, still
years when this war of the body is at an end, and the real war
begins. Rheims is but one of the altars which the heathen
have put up to commemorate their own death throughout all the
world. It will serve. There is a mark, well known by now,
which they have left for a visible seal of their doom. When
they first set the place alight some hundreds of their wounded
were being tended in the Cathedral. The French saved as many
as they could, but some had to be left.
Among them was a
major, who lay with his back against a pillar. It has been
ordained that the signs of his torments should remain--an
outline of both legs and half a body, printed in greasy black
upon the stones. There are very many people who hope and pray
that the sign will be respected at least by our children's
children.
