Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité ...
Masquant sous sa visière une efficacité ...
Jetant toute une armée aux pieds de la prière....
So wrote the poet who fell on the field of honor, in September, 1914, of St. Jeanne, whose martyrdom was a victory; so he might have written of Rheims Cathedral. Again a sublime holocaust was needed for the saving of the soul of France.
RHEIMS SINCE 1914
How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people. How is she become a widow, she that was great among the nations.—Jerimiah: Lamentations.
Designer infinite!
Ah! must Thou char the wood e’er Thou canst limn with it?
—Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven.
In the first days of September, 1914, after the battle of the Marne, the Germans evacuated Rheims, which they had occupied for little over a week. Before they quitted the city, some cans of inflammable liquids, with bundles of straw, were set on the roof of the cathedral, and there they were found and made note of officially by Frenchmen who ascended the towers to hang out the Red Cross flag. The destruction of Rheims Cathedral was planned deliberately and in cold blood it was carried out. No military excuse for the crime is possible, since General Joffre made a formal statement that at no time were the church towers used as posts of observation.
From the heights a few miles away the enemy opened fire on the city. It is said that Baron von Plattenburg ordered the bombardment. General von Haeringen is also cited as an executioner of Rheims Cathedral. On September 17th and 18th the church was riddled with projectiles. Between dawn and sunset, on September 19th, over five hundred of them struck the mammoth church. About four o’clock on that fateful day, Saturday, September 19, 1914, the timber roof caught fire from an inflammable bomb. In less than an hour flames were devouring the wooden scaffolding which, by ill luck, because of repairs in progress, framed part of the edifice. Fire lapped and calcined the outer walls, obliterating the kings and the angels and the saints, wiping out all the loving handicraft of the old stonecutters. Once again molten lead ran in the streets of Rheims. Fire lapped the sculptured screen inside the western doors, and the lovely lavish chiseling has become a blurred, amorphous mass. Projectiles tore through the gaping windows and crashed against the opposite walls. Some of the burning timber from the overroof fell through the apertures of the vault’s keystones and ignited the straw spread on the pavement for the wounded German soldiers who had been left behind when the invaders evacuated the city.
Let an eyewitness relate the burning of Rheims Cathedral: “It stood enveloped in flames, one towering flame itself. Before the outrage something surged unchained at the root of our being. Our cathedral! Our hearts broke as we watched its desecration. An aged woman of the city intoned solemnly: ‘This will bode them no good!’ (‘Ca ne leur portera pas bonheur!’) We stood in groups watching with fierce anger the conflagration. We walked, we spoke, but like automatons, for our souls were groaning with anguish. Our cathedral! Première page de France! Geste des aïeux! Legs des siècles devenant aujourd’hui, en ce poignant martyre, l’hostie nationale!” Suddenly word came that the German wounded inside the church must be saved. The archpriest of the cathedral, Canon Landrieux (to-day a bishop), called for aid from the onlookers. He was answered by angry murmurs: “What! must we then risk our lives to save these bombarders of hospitals, these incendiaries of cathedrals?” Then a young girl’s voice rose, trembling with tears: “On est de France, nous autres!” And instantly men stepped forward to aid the heroic priest save their enemies from the flaming furnace.
Poor martyred Rheims! Its once illuminated western front is battered and corroded past restoral, and is falling flake by flake. With a touch of the finger the stone crumbles into dust. The towers are mutilated. One after another the rapt and fearless angels on the buttresses have been toppled down. As the incessant rain of fire and iron came from the northeast, the transept’s northern entranceway is wrecked—its historic statues mere unsightly stumps. Never again will the hardy lesson of the Last Judgment be preached at the ruined portal.
No more will the triple-winged seraphim chant hosannas in the great western rose. No coming generations of travelers will carry away an undying memory of the sunset hour in the great church, when the western inclosure became a resplendent sheet of flame, and those who paced up and down the basilica gazed with awe at that majestic spectacle of Art and Faith. The XIII-century windows of the clearstory are pulverized; scarcely a fragment is left of the forty lancets of the nave where, in superimposed rows, the kings of France stood, with the archbishops who had crowned them, big-eyed barbaric images, so intense of hue that one remembers them as blood-red rubies. The loss of the windows of Rheims has been expressed poignantly by Pierre Loti, who spent a Sunday in October, 1915, in the cathedral. He found the silence of death within its ravaged walls that for centuries had echoed the music of the liturgy. Only a cold wind now and then made fitful psalmody. When it blew strongly he could hear a patter as of delicate light pearls. It was the falling to oblivion of what still remained of the ancient windows.