One elderly gentleman told me how he had been seized by the Germans as a hostage and threatened with death by hanging.  With forty other first citizens, from the 4th to the 12th of September he had been in jail.  After such an experience one would have thought that between himself and the Germans he would have placed as many miles as possible, but instead he was strolling around the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, in front of the cathedral.  For the French officers who, on sightseeing bent, were motoring into Rheims from the battle line he was acting as a sort of guide.  Pointing with his umbrella, he would say:  “On the left is the new Palace of Justice, the facade entirely destroyed; on the right you see the palace of the archbishop, completely wrecked.  The shells that just passed over us have apparently fallen in the garden of the Hotel Lion d’Or.”  He was as cool as the conductor on a “Seeing Rheims” observation-car.

He was matched in coolness by our consul, William Bardel.  The American consulate is at No. 14 Rue Kellermann.  That morning a shell had hit the chestnut-tree in the garden of his neighbor, at No. 12, and had knocked all the chestnuts into the garden of the consulate.  “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” said Mr. Bardel.

In the bombarded city there was no rule as to how any one would act.  One house would be closed and barred, and the inmates would be either in their own cellar or in the caves of the nearest champagne company.  To those latter they would bring books or playing-cards and, among millions of dust-covered bottles, by candle-light, would wait for the guns to cease.  Their neighbors sat in their shops or stood at the doors of their houses or paraded the streets.  Past them their friends were hastening, trembling with terror.  Many women sat on the front steps, knitting, and with interested eyes watched their acquaintances fleeing toward the Paris gate.  When overhead a shell passed they would stroll, still knitting, out into the middle of the street to see where the shell struck.

By the noise it was quite easy to follow the flight of the shells.  You were tricked by the sound into almost believing you could see them.  The six-inch shells passed with a whistling roar that was quite terrifying.  It was as though just above you invisible telegraph-wires had jangled, and their rush through the air was like the roar that rises to the car window when two express-trains going in opposite directions pass at sixty miles an hour.  When these sounds assailed them the people flying from the city would scream.  Some of them, as though they had been hit, would fall on their knees.  Others were sobbing and praying aloud.  The tears rolled down their cheeks.  In their terror there was nothing ludicrous; they were in as great physical pain as were some of the hundreds in Rheims who had been hit.  And yet others of their fellow townsmen living in the same street, and with the same allotment of brains and nerves, were treating the bombardment with the indifference they would show to a summer shower.