The street in front of the consulate is a mass of fallen stone, and the morning I called on Mr. Bardel a shell had hit his neighbor’s chestnut-tree, filled his garden with chestnut burrs, and blown out the glass of his windows.  He was patching the holes with brown wrapping-paper, but was chiefly concerned because in his own garden the dahlias were broken.  During the first part of the bombardment, when firing became too hot for him, he had retreated with his family to the corner of the street, where are the cellars of the Roderers, the champagne people.  There are worse places in which to hide in than a champagne cellar.

Mr. Bardel has lived six years in Rheims and estimated the damage done to property by shells at thirty millions of dollars, and said that unless the seat of military operations was removed the champagne crop for this year would be entirely wasted.  It promised to be an especially good year.  The seasons were propitious, being dry when sun was needed and wet when rain was needed, but unless the grapes were gathered by the end of September the crops would be lost.

Of interest to Broadway is the fact that in Rheims, or rather in her cellars, are stored nearly fifty million bottles of champagne belonging to six of the best-known houses.  Should shells reach these bottles, the high price of living in the lobster palaces will be proportionately increased.

Except for Red Cross volunteers seeking among the ruins for wounded, I found that part of the city that had suffered completely deserted.  Shells still were falling and houses as yet intact, and those partly destroyed were empty.  You saw pitiful attempts to save the pieces.  In places, as though evictions were going forward, chairs, pictures, cooking-pans, bedding were piled in heaps.  There was none to guard them; certainly there was no one so unfeeling as to disturb them.

I saw neither looting nor any effort to guard against it.  In their common danger and horror the citizens of Rheims of all classes seemed drawn closely together.  The manner of all was subdued and gentle, like those who stand at an open grave.

The shells played the most inconceivable pranks.  In some streets the houses and shops along one side were entirely wiped out and on the other untouched.  In the Rue du Cardinal du Lorraine every house was gone.  Where they once stood were cellars filled with powdered stone.  Tall chimneys that one would have thought a strong wind might dislodge were holding themselves erect, while the surrounding walls, three feet thick, had been crumpled into rubbish.

In some houses a shell had removed one room only, and as neatly as though it were the work of masons and carpenters.  It was as though the shell had a grievance against the lodger in that particular room.  The waste was appalling.

Among the ruins I saw good paintings in rags and in gardens statues covered with the moss of centuries smashed.  In many places, still on the pedestal, you would see a headless Venus, or a flying Mercury chopped off at the waist.