cer would shrug, point to the blue slip, and
we would pass forward.

The cathedral did not long detain us. Outside, for protection, it was
boarded up, packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had been swept of
broken glass, and the paintings, tapestries, and the carved images on
the altars had been removed. A professional sacristan spoke a set
speech, telling me of things I had seen with my own eyes--of burning
rafters that spared the Gobelin tapestries, of the priceless glass
trampled underfoot, of the dead and wounded Germans lying in the straw
that had given the floor the look of a barn. Now it is as empty of
decoration as the Pennsylvania railroad-station in New York. It is a
beautiful shell waiting for the day to come when the candles will be
relit, when the incense will toss before the altar, and the gray walls
glow again with the colors of tapestries and paintings. The windows only
will not bloom as before. The glass destroyed by the Emperor's shells,
all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot restore.

The professional guide, who is already so professional that he is
exchanging German cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail of
impossible bad taste. Among the German wounded there was a major (I
remember describing him a year ago as looking like a college professor)
who, when the fire came, was one of these the priests could not save,
and who was burned alive. Marks on the gray surface of a pillar against
which he reclined and grease spots on the stones of the floor are
supposed to be evidences of his end, a torture brought upon him by the
shells of his own people. Mr. Kipling has written that there are many
who "hope and pray these signs will be respected by our children's
children." Mr. Kipling's hope shows an imperfect conception of the
purposes of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated to God, and on earth to
peace and good-will among men. It is not erected to teach generations of
little children to gloat over the fact that an enemy, even a German
officer, was by accident burned alive.

Personally, I feel the sooner those who introduced "frightfulness" to
France, Belgium, and the coasts of England are hunted down and destroyed
the better. But the stone-mason should get to work, and remove those
stains from the Rheims cathedral. Instead, for our children's children,
would not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or one to the French
priest, Abbe Thinot, who carried the wounded Germans from the burn