At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced--if within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the destruction of a cathedral. Rheims--unless saved by a miracle--is doomed. And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal and the Latin ideal: one must die.
The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again--at Soissons, at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere destruction.
The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,--the lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,--for almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen--in a quarry near Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general explained,--"They hope to make peace with us--_quelle sale race!_"