e
golden riches of Mother Earth. The air indeed, as it shimmered in the
heat above the old town, and the hill slopes where the famous
vineyards lie, seemed to "drop fatness." Wealth, wine, the body and
its pleasures, the cunning handicraft and inherited lore of hundreds
of years and many generations seemed to take visible shape in the fine
old town, in its vast wine-cellars, and in the old inn where we stayed
with its Gargantuan bill of fare, and its _abonnes_ from the town,
ruddy, full-fleshed citizens, whose achievements in the way of eating
and drinking we watched with amazement. Even the cathedral seemed to
me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the
sculptures of the facade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed
rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and
childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age,
than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais,
or Chartres or Rouen. But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever
one looked, of that old spell of _la douce France_! And now! Under the
pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still
on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and
dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few
signs of patching up and returning habitation. And in the great square
before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of
provincial and commercial life--_ruin!_--only intensified by a group
of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and
the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour's wait would enable
them to see. There in front of the great portal stood the Prime
Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop--heroic Cardinal
Lucon, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or
his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd. And
above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front,
blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist,
and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.

The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused
by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West
Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of
glass or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the
pleading powers of the spirit. The "pity of it!" and at the same time,
the te