The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of glass or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the pleading powers of the spirit.  The “pity of it!” and at the same time, the tenacious undying life of France—­all the long past behind her, the unconquerable future before her—­these are the ideas one carries away from Rheims, hot in the heart.  Above all, for the moment, the pity of it—­the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly nos mines—­symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral.  And as we passed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France, which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and village and country houses, and is now but little different from Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a passionate anxiety, almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure.  “France is right—­is right,” I caught myself saying for the hundredth time.  “Before anything else—­justice to her!—­protection and healing for her!  Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and trampled on her, ‘like a wild beast out of the wood,’ and healing for wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed for himself the state of her richest provinces.  It was she who offered her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured most and bled most, heavily as others—­Britain, Italy, Belgium, Serbia—­have endured.  Her claim must come first—­and let those in England and America who wish to realise why come and see.”

We drove down diagonally through the Marne salient as it was last summer after the German break-through on the Marne, to Dormans and so across the river.  In the darkening afternoon we passed over the Montagne de Rheims, and crossed the valley of the Ardre, near the spot where the 19th British Division, in the German attack of last June, put up so splendid a fight in defence of an important position commanding the valley—­the Montagne de Bligny—­that the General of the Fifth French Army, General de Mitry, under whose orders they were, wrote to General Haig:  “They have enabled us to establish a barrier against which the hostile waves have beaten and shattered themselves.  This none of the French who witnessed it will ever forget.”