There a grim scene was only prevented by the courage of the priests of the cathedral. A crowd of about two hundred citizens had come out to watch the terrible spectacle. As these Germans, in their uniforms, appeared at the transept door howls of uncontrollable passion went up from the crowd. “Kill them!” they shouted. Soldiers in the crowd leveled their rifles, when Abbé Andrieux sprang forward between the wounded men and the muzzles that threatened them.
“Don’t fire,” he shouted, “you would make yourselves as guilty as they.”
The reproach was enough, and amid fierce hooting and angry cries the Germans were carried to shelter in the museum near by.
From the hills the flaming cathedral was an even more impressive sight than in the streets of the town. From the yawning roof the red glare poured up into the dark sky and its windows flickered with dancing flames. So night closed down. Not for long was its stillness undisturbed. At two o’clock German batteries opened fire again. Then from windows that looked toward Rheims across the plain one could watch the lurid sight of night bombardment.
At last daybreak came, a sad gray dawn, with cold, dispiriting rain falling. When the shadows had lifted and enough light had filtered through the low, lead-colored clouds for one to see across the plain, the ravished city, with its ruined cathedral standing stark against the background and a vast wall of smoke rising slowly from the still flaming ruins, was as desolate a thing as the sun could well have found in its journey round the world that morning.
“SUPREME SACRIFICE AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF MAN”
“Will not every artist, every writer, every lover of the beautiful, unite with us in a protestation of horror against the infamous destruction of Rheims Cathedral?” wrote Emile Hovelaque, French Inspector General of Public Instruction, in a letter to the London Times. “It was the cradle of our kings, the high altar of our race, a sanctuary and shrine dear from every memory, sacred in every thought, loved as our remotest past, an ever-speaking witness to the permanence through change of the ideals, aspirations and dreams of our country.
“Can such deeds go unavenged? Will not the conscience of the whole world rise against those nameless barbarians who shelled Red Cross flags floating over that twice-sacred pile, who have committed this supreme sacrifice against the spirit of man in seven hundred years? Those gray cliffs of chiseled stone had risen above the furious tides of innumerable invasions unhurt, spared by the most savage onsets. Battered, by every storm of heaven and earth, the noblest sculpture of the West remained until German culture came.
“And then, deliberately, methodically, slowly, the princes and captains of an accursed race mangled the sacred pile until all had fallen. Fairest and most human images in all the world, a forest of gigantic columns, a vast vaulted canopy of stone, majestic walls and heaven-stained glass—it was murder in cold blood, the murder not of a life but of immortality. Forty-eight long hours the inexplicable crime dragged out. Louvain first, now Rheims. What next?”