heims, 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 n