And these two monuments, side by side on the Baupaume Road, stand out as one of the Silhouettes of Sacrilege.

Then there is St. Gervais.  On Good Friday afternoon a Hun shell pierced the side of this beautiful cathedral as the spear-thrust pierced the side of the Master so long ago.  On the very hour that Jesus was crucified back on that other and first Good Friday the Hun threw his bolt of death into the nave of this church, and crucified seventy-five people kneeling in memory of their Saviour’s death.

I was in that church an hour after this terrible sacrilege happened.  Never can one forget the scene.  I dare not describe it here in its awful details.

The entire arches of stone that held up the roof had fallen in from the concussion of the gases of the shell.  Three feet of solid stones covered the floor.  Men and women were being carried out.  Silk hats, canes, shoes, hats, baby clothes, an expensive fur, lay buried in the stone and dirt.

As I stood horrified, looking on this scene of death and destruction, the phrase came into my heart: 

  “And the veil of the temple was rent in twain.”

And this scene, too, shall remain as one of the Silhouettes of Sacrilege.

But perhaps the worst Silhouette of Sacrilege that the film of one’s memory has brought away from France is that of a certain afternoon in Paris.

I happened to be walking along the Boulevard to my hotel.  The big gun had been throwing its shells into the city all day.  Suddenly one fell so close to where I was walking that it broke the windows around me, and I was nearly thrown to my feet.  In my soul I cursed the Hun, as all who have lived in Paris finally come to be doing as each shell bursts.  But I had more reason to curse than I knew at that moment.

The people were running into a side street, the next one toward which I was approaching.  I followed the crowd.  My uniform got me past the gendarmes in through a little court, up a pair of stairs where the shell had penetrated the walls of a maternity hospital.

What I saw there in that room shall make me hate the Hun forever.

New-born babes had been killed, a nurse and two mothers.  When I thought of the expectant homes into which those babes had come, when I thought of the fathers at the front who would never see again either their wives or those new babies, when I saw the blood that smeared the plaster and floors of that room, when I saw the little twisted baby beds, a flush of hatred swept over me, as it did over all who saw it, a new birth of hatred that could never die until those little babies and those mothers and the nurse are avenged.  That is a Silhouette of Sacrilege that makes the gamut complete.

There was the desecration of the holy sanctuaries; there was the desecration of the graves of brave soldiers of France; there was the derision of his bronze cross; there was the desecration of the most sacred day in Christendom, Good Friday, and then the desecration of little children, mothers of new-born babes, and nurses.  Could the case be more complete?  Could Silhouettes of Sacrilege cover a wider gamut of hatred and disgust than these silhouettes picture?