He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war.  Three weeks he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the shells screaming overhead—­screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel.  Never has he lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them again.  From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence, as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante’s Inferno, with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults.  A great wine-cellar—­there are ten miles of them at Rheims—­crowded with four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of babies at the breast.  Overhead the crash of falling masonry—­the men had armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the vaults fell in.  Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of anguish.  Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom.  After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared.  One masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen’s chisel is, however, irremediably destroyed—­the figure of the devil.  We hope it is a portent.

* * * * *

The King’s Messenger had posted from a distant country, and his way through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa.  Thirty-six people standing in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment—­he had surrendered his royal prerogative of exclusion—­was a woman on the verge of hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her sorrow.  She and her husband had a son—­the only son of his mother—­gone to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver.  Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood—­his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven.  The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale.  No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain.  She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose eyes were dry. Stabat Mater Dolorosa.

XVIII

BARBARA