“How?”

“Because he has shown us what Evil is.  We—­you and I, England and the rest—­had begun to doubt the existence of Evil.  The Boche is saving us.”

Then we had another look at the animal in its trench—­a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the mist.  Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find the same observation-post, table, map, observer, and telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; and same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland to the sea.  The handling of the war varies with the nature of the country, but the tools are unaltered.  One looks upon them at last with the same weariness of wonder as the eye receives from endless repetitions of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  A long, low profile, with a lump to one side, means the field-gun and its attendant ammunition-case; a circle and slot stand for an observation-post; the trench is a bent line, studded with vertical plumes of explosion; the great guns of position, coming and going on their motors, repeat themselves as scarabs; and man himself is a small blue smudge, no larger than a foresight, crawling and creeping or watching and running among all these terrific symbols.

TRAGEDY OF RHEIMS

But there is no hieroglyphic for Rheims, no blunting of the mind at the abominations committed on the cathedral there.  The thing peers upward, maimed and blinded, from out of the utter wreckage of the Archbishop’s palace on the one side and dust-heaps of crumbled houses on the other.  They shelled, as they still shell it, with high explosives and with incendiary shells, so that the statues and the stonework in places are burned the colour of raw flesh.  The gargoyles are smashed; statues, crockets, and spires tumbled; walls split and torn; windows thrust out and tracery obliterated.  Wherever one looks at the tortured pile there is mutilation and defilement, and yet it had never more of a soul than it has to-day.

Inside—­("Cover yourselves, gentlemen,” said the sacristan, “this place is no longer consecrated")—­everything is swept clear or burned out from end to end, except two candlesticks in front of the niche where Joan of Arc’s image used to stand.  There is a French flag there now. [And the last time I saw Rheims Cathedral was in a spring twilight, when the great west window glowed, and the only lights within were those of candles which some penitent English had lit in Joan’s honour on those same candlesticks.] The high altar was covered with floor-carpets; the pavement tiles were cracked and jarred out by the rubbish that had fallen from above, the floor was gritty with dust of glass and powdered stone, little twists of leading from the windows, and iron fragments.  Two great doors had been blown inwards by the blast of a shell in the Archbishop’s garden, till they had bent grotesquely to the curve of a cask.  There they had jammed.