wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It
was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must
have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate,
all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and
there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to
their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle
of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and
found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the
pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron
can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet
square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the
hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one
in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about,
gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast
upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course,
is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are
intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires
and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and
the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the
church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass
as art treasures.

That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who
said the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheims
made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters
bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought
a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a
piece!

We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back