[9] America in France, by Lt.-Col.  Frederick Palmer, S.C., U.S.A.

It was on our way from Rheims to Paris after our drive through the Champagne battle-field that we passed rapidly through the places and scenes which Colonel Palmer describes.

As we approached Rheims about midday, a thick white fog rolled suddenly and silently over the chalk uplands that saw General Gouraud’s campaign of last September and October.  We ran through it, past a turning to Moronvilliers on the left—­famous name!—­and within a short distance of Nogent l’Abbesse, the fort which did most to wreck Rheims Cathedral, and so down in a dreary semi-darkness into Rheims itself.

Thirty-five years ago I was in Rheims for the first and only time, before this visit.  It was in September, not long before the vintage.  The town and the country-side were steeped in sunlight, and in the golden riches of Mother Earth.  The air indeed, as it shimmered in the heat above the old town, and the hill slopes where the famous vineyards lie, seemed to “drop fatness.”  Wealth, wine, the body and its pleasures, the cunning handicraft and inherited lore of hundreds of years and many generations seemed to take visible shape in the fine old town, in its vast wine-cellars, and in the old inn where we stayed with its Gargantuan bill of fare, and its abonnes from the town, ruddy, full-fleshed citizens, whose achievements in the way of eating and drinking we watched with amazement.  Even the cathedral seemed to me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the sculptures of the facade with its famous “laughing angel” expressed rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age, than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais, or Chartres or Rouen.  But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever one looked, of that old spell of la douce France!  And now!  Under the pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few signs of patching up and returning habitation.  And in the great square before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of provincial and commercial life—­ruin!—­only intensified by a group of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour’s wait would enable them to see.  There in front of the great portal stood the Prime Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop—­heroic Cardinal Lucon, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd.  And above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front, blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist, and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.