“Curiously enough,” he said, without waiting for any opening question from THE TIMES reporter—­Mr. Smith often interviews himself—­“curiously enough, I was on my way to Rheims to make a sketch of the Cathedral when the war broke out.  I had started out to make a series of sketches of the great European cathedrals.  Not etchings, but charcoal sketches.

“Let me say here, too, that cathedrals for the most part ought not to be etched.  You lose too many shadows, though you gain in line; but in the etching you have to cross-hatch so heavily with ink that the result is just ink, and not shadow at all.  Charcoal gives you depth and transparency.  I was eager to do a series of the cathedrals, as I had done a series for the Dickens and Thackeray books, and had planned to give my, entire Summer to it.

“I had been in London for some time.  I had sketched in Westminster, in St. Bartholomew’s.  Everything peaceful and quiet.  It seems now as if we ought to have felt—­all of us, the people on the streets, I, shopkeepers, every one—­the approach of this tremendous war.  But we didn’t, of course.  No one in England had the faintest suspicion that this terrible inhuman thing was going to happen.

“I went on to France.  I sketched Notre Dame, over which they exploded shells a month or so later.  I did some work in the beautiful St. Etienne.  I sauntered down into South Normandy and was stopping for a little color work at the Inn of William the Conqueror before going on to Rheims.”

These water colors of French farms, French inns, and French gardens are glimpses caught at the very eleventh hour before France put on a totally different aspect.

“The war broke out.  There at the quiet little French inn everything suddenly changed color.  It was quick, it was quiet.  There was a complete change in the snap of a finger.  All the chauffeurs and the porters and the waiters—­men who had been there for years and with whom we who visit there Summer after Summer have grown familiar—­suddenly stopped work, gave up their jobs, were turned into soldiers.  One hardly recognized them.

“We were all stunned.  I realized that I could not go on to Rheims, that I probably should not get down into Italy.  I scarcely realized at first what that meant.  I could not conceive, none of us could conceive,” Mr. Smith exploded violently, “that any one, under any necessity whatsoever, should lay hands on the Rheims Cathedral.  It’s too monstrous!  The world will never forgive it, never!

“The world is divided, I tell you!  It is not a Double Alliance and a Triple Entente; it is not a Germany and a Russia and a United States and an Italy and an England.  That is not the division of the world just now.  There are two sides, and only two sides.  There is barbarism on the one hand, civilization on the other; there is brutality and there is humanity.  And humanity is going to win, but the sacrifices are awful—­awful!”