From north and south the windows shed a radiance of deep blue, like the blue of the sky by moonlight on the coldest night of winter, and from the west the great rose window glowed with the warmth and beauty of a thousand rubies.  Beneath it, bathed in crimson light, where for generations French men and women have knelt in prayer, where Joan of Arc helped place the crown on Charles VII, was piled three feet of dirty straw, and on the straw were gray-coated Germans, covered with the mud of the fields, caked with blood, white and haggard from the loss of it, from the lack of sleep, rest, and food.  The entire west end of the cathedral looked like a stable, and in the blue and purple rays from the gorgeous windows the wounded were as unreal as ghosts.  Already two of them had passed into the world of ghosts.  They had not died from their wounds, but from a shell sent by their own people.

It had come screaming into this backwater of war, and, tearing out leaded window-panes as you would destroy cobwebs, had burst among those who already had paid the penalty.  And so two of them, done with pack-drill, goose-step, half rations and forced marches, lay under the straw the priests had heaped upon them.  The toes of their boots were pointed grotesquely upward.  Their gray hands were clasped rigidly as though in prayer.

Half hidden in the straw, the others were as silent and almost as still.  Since they had been dropped upon the stone floor they had not moved, but lay in twisted, unnatural attitudes.  Only their eyes showed that they lived.  These were turned beseechingly upon the French Red Cross doctors, kneeling waist-high in the straw and unreeling long white bandages.  The wounded watched them drawing slowly nearer, until they came, fighting off death, clinging to life as shipwrecked sailors cling to a raft and watch the boats pulling toward them.

A young German officer, his smart cavalry cloak torn and slashed, and filthy with dried mud and blood and with his eyes in bandages, groped toward a pail of water, feeling his way with his foot, his arms outstretched, clutching the air.  To guide him a priest took his arm, and the officer turned and stumbled against him.  Thinking the priest was one of his own men, he swore at him, and then, to learn if he wore shoulder-straps, ran his fingers over the priest’s shoulders, and, finding a silk cassock, said quickly in French:  “Pardon me, my father; I am blind.”

As the young cure guided me through the wrecked cathedral his indignation and his fear of being unjust waged a fine battle.  “Every summer,” he said, “thousands of your fellow countrymen visit the cathedral.  They come again and again.  They love these beautiful windows.  They will not permit them to be destroyed.  Will you tell them what you saw?”