“Today these streets are terrible to look upon.  House after house has been shattered to pieces—­broken to a pile of stones.  One of the small turrets of the cathedral has been demolished, and a rent has been torn in the stone work of the tower.  The station is like a wilderness.”

RHEIMS CATHEDRAL DAMAGED

A correspondent gives a vivid account of the German bombardment of Rheims, during the battle on the Aisne, as viewed by him from the belfry of the famous cathedral.

“What a spectacle it was!” he said.  “Under the cold, drifting gray rainclouds the whole semicircle of the horizon was edged by heights on which the German batteries were mounted, three miles away.

“There was nothing but the inferno of bursting shells, those of the Germans landing anywhere within the space of a square mile.  Sometimes it was just outside the town that they fell, trying to find the French troops lying there in their trenches, waiting to go forward to the attack of the hills, when their artillery should have prepared the way.

“The cathedral tower made a wonderful grand stand from which to watch this appalling game of destruction.  It was under the protection of the Red Cross flag, for directly the shells began to hit the cathedral in the morning some German wounded were brought in from a hospital nearby and laid on straw in the nave, while Abbe Andreaux and a Red Cross soldier pluckily climbed to the top of the tower and hung out two Geneva flags.

“The crescendo scream the shells make has something fiendish in it that would be thrilling apart from the danger of which it is the sign.  You hear it a full second before the shell strikes, and in that time you can tell instinctively the direction of its flight.

“Then comes the crash of the explosion, which is like all the breakages you ever heard gathered into one simultaneous smash.”

SAVING THE GERMAN WOUNDED

A few of the German shells struck the cathedral and set it on fire.  The scene was thus described by Abbe Camu, a priest of Rheims: 

“It was all over in an hour.  There were two separate fires.  We put the first out with four buckets of water, all we had in the place, but soon another shell struck the roof and the wind drove the flames along the rafters inside of the nave.  We rushed up, but it was flaming all along and as we could do nothing, we hurried down.

“There were holes in the ceiling of the nave and sparks began to fall through them into a great heap of straw, ten feet high and twenty yards long, which the Germans had piled along the north aisle.  We tried to catch the sparks in our hands as they fell, and such of the German wounded as were able to walk helped us.  But the first spark that fell on the pile set it blazing.  There was time to think of nothing but getting out the wounded.