On September 4th the Germans entered Rheims, and occupied it until the 12th, when they retreated across the Vesle to the hills north of the city.

On the 18th the French forces, having entered Rheims, the Germans bombarded the city with field-guns and howitzers.

Rheims is fifty-six miles from Paris, but, though I started at an early hour, so many bridges had been destroyed that I did not reach the city until three o’clock in the afternoon.  At that hour the French artillery, to the east at Nogent and immediately outside the northern edge of the town, were firing on the German positions, and the Germans were replying, their shells falling in the heart of the city.

The proportion of those that struck the cathedral or houses within a hundred yards of it to those falling on other buildings was about six to one.  So what damage the cathedral suffered was from blows delivered not by accident but with intent.  As the priests put it, firing on the church was “expres.”

The cathedral dominates not only the city but the countryside.  It rises from the plain as Gibraltar rises from the sea, as the pyramids rise from the desert.  And at a distance of six miles, as you approach from Paris along the valley of the Marne, it has more the appearance of a fortress than a church.  But when you stand in the square beneath and look up, it is entirely ecclesiastic, of noble and magnificent proportions, in design inspired, much too sublime for the kings it has crowned, and almost worthy of the king in whose honor, seven hundred years ago, it was reared.  It has been called “perhaps the most beautiful structure produced in the Middle Ages.”  On the west facade, rising tier upon tier, are five hundred and sixty statues and carvings.  The statues are of angels, martyrs, patriarchs, apostles, the vices and virtues, the Virgin and Child.  In the centre of these is the famous rose window; on either side giant towers.

At my feet down the steps leading to the three portals were pools of blood.  There was a priest in the square, a young man with white hair and with a face as strong as one of those of the saints carved in stone, and as gentle.  He was cure doyen of the Church of St. Jacques, M. Chanoine Frezet, and he explained the pools of blood.  After the Germans retreated, the priests had carried the German wounded up the steps into the nave of the cathedral and for them had spread straw upon the stone flagging.

The cure guided me to the side door, unlocked it, and led the way into the cathedral.  It is built in the form of a crucifix, and so vast is the edifice that many chapels are lost in it, and the lower half is in a shadow.  But from high above the stained windows of the thirteenth century, or what was left of them, was cast a glow so gorgeous, so wonderful, so pure that it seemed to come direct from the other world.