“Ou allez vous, Monsieur?” the sentry at the bridge of Epernay challenges our chauffeur. And the French captain himself leans from the window to answer, “À Rheims. Une mission de la gouvernement.” So we pass sentry after sentry. It is 15 miles to Rheims. This is the Department of the Marne, with the vineyards that have produced the most famous wines of the world. The “smiling countryside of France,” the poets have termed it. In September, 1914, history changed it to the grim field of carnage running red with the blood of civilisation that here made its stand against the onrushing Huns. Right across that valley see the battlefield of the Marne. Along this road the German army passed. From this little village that we are entering, all the inhabitants fled before their approach. The enemy now is not far away. Over there, just against that horizon, lie the trenches they now occupy. See this roadside along which we are driving, how it is curiously hung with linen curtains? They are strung on wires fifteen feet high. For miles we ride behind them. It is the camouflage, the French captain says, that hides us from German view. We have just emerged from the forest at the edge of the Mountain of Rheims when, hark! Hear it—the sharp, distinct sound of an explosion! What is it? Where is it? The captain lays his hand reassuringly on my arm: “It is, I think, a tire that has burst on the rear car.”
“Captain,” I say, “no automobile tire I ever heard sounded exactly like that.”
“You are not nervous?” he asks. I shake my head. “Well,” he admits, “it is sometimes that the Germans do take a chance shot at this road.”
But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells. We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some 120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the pavement there between the street-car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence, the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us along to the next street.
A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION
In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how pleasant can be the sound even of noise.
Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their homes even though they must live in the cellar. Now the devastation increases and the houses begin to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and mortar as we approach the Place de la Cathédrale.
At length we stand before the famous Cathedral of Rheims itself. I know of no more impressive place to be in the closing days of the year 1916 than here at the front of the terrible world war.
In this edifice is symbolised all that civilisation of ours that culminated in the Twentieth Century, now to be razed to the ground. For lo, these seven hundred years, even as the two great towers above us have lifted the infinite beauty of their architectural lace-work against the blue-domed sky, some thirty generations of the human soul have sent their aspirations heavenward on the incense of prayer. Over these very stones beneath our feet, king after king of France has walked, to receive the crown of Charlemagne and to be anointed before this altar from “le sainte ampouli.” And now here to-day is history in no dead and musty pages but in the making, white-hot from the anvil of the hour! Only a little over a mile away are the German guns that from day to day shower the shell-fire of their destruction on the city. This spot upon which we stand is their particular objective point of attack. Hear! There is a rumbling detonation. We wait hushed for an instant. But the sound is not repeated. You see, already there have been some 30,000 shells poured on Rheims. Twelve hundred fell in one day only. At any moment there may be more.
“If the bombardment should begin,” we had been instructed at Maison de la Presse, “you would rush for the nearest cellar.” I think we all have listening ears. Every little while there is certainly repeated that desultory firing on the front.