The inhabitants of this quarter, and of other quarters in Rheims, have gone.  Some are dead.  Others are picnicking in Epernay, Paris, elsewhere.  They have left everything behind them, and yet they have left nothing.  Each knows his lot in the immense tragedy.  Nobody can realise the whole of the tragedy.  It defies the mind; and, moreover, the horror of it is allayed somewhat by the beautiful forms which ruin—­even the ruin of modern ugly architecture—­occasionally takes.  The effect of the pallor of a bedroom wall-paper against smoke-blackened masonry, where some corner of a house sticks up like a tall, serrated column out of the confusion, remains obstinately in the memory, symbolising, somehow, the grand German deed.

For do not forget that this quarter accurately represents what the Germans came out of Germany into France deliberately to do.  This material devastation, this annihilation of effort, hope, and love, this substitution of sorrow for joy—­is just what plans and guns were laid for, what the worshipped leaders of the Fatherland prepared with the most wanton and scientific solicitude.  It is desperately cruel.  But it is far worse than cruel—­it is idiotic in its immense futility.  The perfect idiocy of the thing overwhelms you.  And to your reason it is monstrous that one population should overrun another with murder and destruction from political covetousness as that two populations should go to war concerning a religious creed.  Indeed, it is more monstrous.  It is an obscene survival, a phenomenon that has strayed through some negligence of fate, into the wrong century.

Strange, in an adjoining quarter, partly but not utterly destroyed, a man is coming home in a cab with luggage from the station, and the servant-girl waits for him at the house-door.  And I heard of a case where a property-owner who had begun to build a house just before the war has lately resumed building operations.  In the Esplanade Ceres the fountain is playing amid all the ravage; and the German trenches, in that direction, are not more than two miles away.

It is quite impossible for any sane man to examine the geography of the region of destruction which I have so summarily described without being convinced that the Germans, in shelling it, were simply aiming at the Cathedral.  Tracing the streets affected, one can follow distinctly the process of their searching for the precise range of the Cathedral.  Practically the whole of the damage is concentrated on the line of the Cathedral.

But the Cathedral stands.

Its parvis is grass-grown; the hotels on the parvis are heavily battered, and if they are not destroyed it is because the Cathedral sheltered them; the Archbishop’s palace lies in fragments; all around is complete ruin.  But the Cathedral stands, high above the level of disaster, a unique target, and a target successfully defiant.  The outer roof is quite gone; much masonry is smashed; some of the calcined statues have exactly