These "murdered cities" are glorified forever more....
How one's imagination responds to their very names: Verdun, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Arras, Valenciennes!—and those others of Flanders: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, Malines, Lille and Ypres—how full are these of grace and fancy. What ring of shield!—What clang of arms!
For forty years these towns have enjoyed peace and fancied security, while that once great power, with hypocritical words of good will towards all men, even while sending delegates to the conferences at The Hague, was deliberately planning the destruction of sleeping nations whose lands are now invaded; whose young manhood is disappearing in a storm of blood and iron; whose architectural treasures are now but smoldering heaps of ashes!
Rheims Cathedral, it is urged, was a landmark; a menace to the invader;—and this is true. It was a landmark, most certainly, and therefore it was a menace to the army of the invader, and was destroyed. This fact established, there followed the destruction of the other cathedrals, and it may be that before the invader is beaten off and pushed back over his own boundary line, those other great works of art still untouched will vanish under the rain of fire and shell—and none remain.
Such a catastrophe is appalling, and it may be realized before the war is over, for there is small reason why all should not suffer the fate of great St. Martin's at Ypres, and Rheims, at the hands of the descendants of the Huns and the Allemanni. As it is now six great cathedral towns lie inclosed within their iron clad battle lines—Soissons, Lâon, Senlis, Amiens, Noyon and Rheims; of these Rheims, Soissons, Noyon and Senlis have been ruined; Amiens remains (so we are told) intact. No such assurance is given of Lâon, with its wonderful square ended choir, the only one in France, and the remarkable effigies of oxen, carved in stone, on the tops of the twin towers.
NOYON
NOYON is really a most beautiful little town asleep amid surrounding heavy verdure and, with its dominating cathedral towers of Notre Dame, half Romanesque, half Gothic, which architects pronounce one of the best specimens of the transition period in France, is a veritable storehouse of interest." (I find this in my notebook, dated July, 1910.)
It was named by the Romans "Noviodunam Veroman-duorum" and was notable as the residence of the great Bishops SS. Medard and Eloi.
Here Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks in 768. Jacques Sarrazin was born here in 1592, and a monument to him by the sculptor Mohlknecht was placed on the promenade in 1851.