In other parts of the city the fire department was engaged with fire lit by the bombardment, and unaided, the flames gained upon him.  Seeing this, he called for volunteers, and, under the direction of the Archbishop of Rheims, they carried on stretchers from the burning building the wounded Germans.  The rescuing parties were not a minute too soon.  Already from the roofs molten lead, as deadly as bullets, was falling among the wounded.  The blazing doors had turned the straw on which they lay into a prairie fire.

Splashed by the molten lead and threatened by falling timbers, the priests, at the risk of their lives and limbs, carried out the wounded Germans, sixty in all.

But, after bearing them to safety, their charges were confronted with a new danger.  Inflamed by the sight of their own dead, four hundred citizens having been killed by the bombardment, and by the loss of their cathedral, the people of Rheims who were gathered about the burning building called for the lives of the German prisoners.  “They are barbarians,” they cried.  “Kill them!” Archbishop Landreaux and Abbe Chinot placed themselves in front of the wounded.

“Before you kill them,” they cried, “you must first kill us.”

This is not highly colored fiction, but fact.  It is more than fact.  It is history, for the picture of the venerable archbishop, with his cathedral blazing behind him, facing a mob of his own people in defence of their enemies, will always live in the annals of this war and in the annals of the church.

There were other features of this fire and bombardment which the Catholic Church will not allow to be forgotten.  The leaden roofs were destroyed, the oak timbers that for several hundred years had supported them were destroyed, stone statues and flying buttresses weighing many tons were smashed into atoms, but not a single crucifix was touched, not one waxen or wooden image of the Virgin disturbed, not one painting of the Holy Family marred.

I saw the Gobelin tapestries, more precious than spun gold, intact, while sparks fell about them, and lying beneath them were iron bolts twisted by fire, broken rooftrees and beams still smouldering.

But the special Providence that saved the altars was not omnipotent.  The windows that were the glory of the cathedral were wrecked.  Through some the shells had passed, others the explosions had blown into tiny fragments.  Where, on my first visit, I saw in the stained glass gaping holes, now the whole window had been torn from the walls.  Statues of saints and crusader and cherubim lay in mangled fragments.  The great bells, each of which is as large as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, that for hundreds of years for Rheims have sounded the angelus, were torn from their oak girders and melted into black masses of silver and copper, without shape and without sound.  Never have I looked upon a picture of such pathos, of such wanton and wicked destruction.