om a distance, so completely dominates everything, as a giant's
castle might dominate the dwellings of dwarfs, its high gray
silhouette seems to have bent down to hide itself. "The cathedral,"
the people reply, "at first straight on; then you must turn to the
left, then to the right, and so on." And my auto plunges into the
crowded streets. Many soldiers, regiments on the march, files of
ambulance wagons; but also many chance passers-by, no more concerned
than if nothing was happening; even many well-dressed women with
prayer-books in their hands, for it is Sunday.

Where two streets cross, there is a crowd before a house, the walls of
which have been freshly scratched; a shell fell there, just now,
without any useful result, as without any excuse. A mere brutal jest,
to say: "You know, we are here!" A mere game, a question of killing a
few people, choosing Sunday morning because there are more people in
the streets. But, in truth, one would say that this city has
completely made up its mind to being under the savage field-glasses
ambushed on the neighboring hillsides; these passers-by stop a minute
to look at the wall, the marks of the bits of iron, and then quietly
continue their Sunday walk. This time it was some women, they tell us,
and little girls that this neat jest laid low in pools of blood; they
tell us that; and they think no more of it, as if it were a very small
thing in days like these.... Now the district becomes deserted; closed
houses, a silence, as of mourning. And at the end of a street, the
great gray doors appear, the high pointed arches marvellously
chiseled, the high towers. Not a sound, and not a living soul on the
square where the phantom basilica still sits enthroned, and an icy
wind blows there, under an opaque sky.

It still keeps its place as by a miracle, the basilica of Rheims, but
so riddled and torn that one divines that it is ready to founder at
the slightest shock; it gives the impression of a great mummy, still
upright and majestic, but which a mere nothing will turn to ashes. The
ground is strewn with precious relics of it. It has been hurriedly
surrounded with a solid barrier of white boards, within which its
holy dust has formed heaps: fragments of rose-windows, broken piles of
stained glass, heads of angels, the joined hands of saints. From the
top of the tower to the base, the charred stone has taken on a strange
color of cooked flesh, and the holy personages, still upright in r