the world. Children know Rheims through the wicked magpie which
the archbishop excommunicated, and to their elders, if they are rich,
Rheims is the place from which comes all their champagne.

On September 4th the Germans entered Rheims, and occupied it
until the 12th, when they retreated across the Vesle to the hills north
of the city.

On the 18th the French forces, having entered Rheims, the Germans
bombarded the city with field-guns and howitzers.

Rheims is fifty-six miles from Paris, but, though I started at an early
hour, so many bridges had been destroyed that I did not reach the
city until three o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour the French
artillery, to the east at Nogent and immediately outside the northern
edge of the town, were firing on the German positions, and the
Germans were replying, their shells falling in the heart of the city.

The proportion of those that struck the cathedral or houses within a
hundred yards of it to those falling on other buildings was about six to
one. So what damage the cathedral suffered was from blows
delivered not by accident but with intent. As the priests put it, firing on
the church was "exprès."

The cathedral dominates not only the city but the countryside. It rises
from the plain as Gibraltar rises from the sea, as the pyramids rise
from the desert. And at a distance of six miles, as you approach from
Paris along the valley of the Marne, it has more the appearance of a
fortress than a church. But when you stand in the square beneath
and look up, it is entirely ecclesiastic, of noble and magnificent