ome, perhaps the
world's best loved and most admired building was the Cathedral of
Rheims. There Joan of Arc crowned Charles IX; there for centuries the
noblest men of France had gone to receive their offices and their
honours. A building that belonged to the world. What treasures of beauty
for the whole human race in the thousand and more statues in the
cathedral! How priceless the twelfth-century stained glass! What
paintings which have come down from the masters of Italy! Whoever
visited the library and the Cardinal's palace without exclaiming: "What
beautiful missals! What illuminated manuscripts?"

Fully conscious of the fact that they were impotent to produce such
treasures the Germans, unable to get closer to the cathedral than four
miles, determined to destroy them. Day after day they bombed the noble
cathedral. Gone now, too, the great stone roof! Fallen the flying
buttresses, ruined the chapels. Perished all the tapestries, the rugs
and the laces. Water stands in puddles on the floor. The cathedral is a
blackened shell.

The victim of grievous ingratitude, King Lear, was turned out into the
snow and hail by his wicked daughters; and the white-haired old king
wandered through the blackness of the night beneath the falling hail.
And, lo! the Cathedral of Rheims is a King Lear in architecture--broken,
wounded, exposed to the hails of the autumn and the snow of the winter,
through the coarseness and vandalism of the Germans.

The German Foreign Minister put it all in one word: "Let the neutrals
cease their everlasting chatter about the destruction of Rheims
Cathedral. All the paintings, statues and cathedrals in the world are
not so much as one straw to the Germans over against the gaining of our
goal and the conquest of their land."

Never was a truer word spoken. The German lacks the imagination and the
gift of the love of the beautiful. He would prefer one bologna sausage
factory and one brewery to the Parthenon, with St. Peter's and Rheims
Cathedral thrown in.

8. The German Sniper Who Hid Behind the Crucifix

For hundreds of years the French peasants have loved the crucifix. Many
a beautiful woman carries a little gold cross with the figure of Jesus
fastened thereto, and from time to time draws it out to press the
crucifix to her lips. Even in the harvest fields and beside the road,
travellers find the carved figure of the Saviour lifted up to draw poor,
ignorant and sinful men to His own level.

O