nacious undying life of France--all the long past behind her,
the unconquerable future before her--these are the ideas one carries
away from Rheims, hot in the heart. Above all, for the moment, the
pity of it--the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North
Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly _nos
mines_--symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in
stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral.
And as we passed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the
bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France,
which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and
village and country houses, and is now but little different from
Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a passionate anxiety,
almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure.
"France is right--is _right_," I caught myself saying for the
hundredth time. "Before anything else--justice to her!--protection and
healing for her! Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and
trampled on her, 'like a wild beast out of the wood,' and healing for
wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed
for himself the state of her richest provinces. It was she who offered
her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us
all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured
most and bled most, heavily as others--Britain, Italy, Belgium,
Serbia--have endured. Her claim must come first--and let those in
England and America who wish to realise why _come and see_."

We drove down diagonally through the Marne salient as it was last
summer after the German break-through on the Marne, to Dormans and so
across the river. In the darkening afternoon we passed over the
Montagne de Rheims, and crossed the valley of the Ardre, near the spot
where the 19th British Division, in the German attack of last June,
put up so splendid a fight in defence of an important position
commanding the valley--the Montagne de Bligny--that the General of the
Fifth French Army, General de Mitry, under whose orders they were,
wrote to General Haig: "They have enabled us to establish a barrier
against which the hostile waves have beaten and shattered themselves.
This none of the French who witnessed it will ever forget."

For if the Montagne de Bligny had gone, the French position on the
Montagne de Rheims, south-west of Rheim