et of ground-floor: ten people
were in the cellars, and none was hurt. Uninjured signs of cafes and
shops, such as "The Good Hope," "The Success of the Day," meet
your gaze with sardonic calm.

The inhabitants of this quarter, and of other quarters in Rheims,
have gone. Some are dead. Others are picnicking in Epernay, Paris,
elsewhere. They have left everything behind them, and yet they
have left nothing. Each knows his lot in the immense tragedy.
Nobody can realise the whole of the tragedy. It defies the mind; and,
moreover, the horror of it is allayed somewhat by the beautiful forms
which ruin--even the ruin of modern ugly architecture--occasionally
takes. The effect of the pallor of a bedroom wall-paper against
smoke-blackened masonry, where some corner of a house sticks
up like a tall, serrated column out of the confusion, remains
obstinately in the memory, symbolising, somehow, the grand
German deed.

For do not forget that this quarter accurately represents what the
Germans came out of Germany into France deliberately to do. This
material devastation, this annihilation of effort, hope, and love, this
substitution of sorrow for joy--is just what plans and guns were laid
for, what the worshipped leaders of the Fatherland prepared with
the most wanton and scientific solicitude. It is desperately cruel. But
it is far worse than cruel--it is idiotic in its immense futility. The
perfect idiocy of the thing overwhelms you. And to your reason it is
monstrous that one population should overrun another with murder
and destruction from political covetousness as that two populations
should go to war concerning a religious creed. Indeed, it is more
monstrous. It is an obscene survival, a phenomenon that has
strayed through some negligence of fate, into the wrong century.

Strange, in an adjoining quarter, partly but not utterly destroyed, a
man is coming home in a cab with luggage from the station, and the
servant-girl waits for him at the house-door. And I heard of a case
where a property-owner who had begun to build a house just before
the war has lately resumed building operations. In the Esplanade
Ceres the fountain is playing amid all the ravage; and the German
trenches, in that direction, are not more than two miles away.

It is quite impossible for any sane man to examine the geography of
the region of destruction which I have so summarily described
without being convinced that the Germans, in shelling it, were sim