Moreover, it is wiser to move on under that roof with head turned upward and not to watch too closely where the feet may fall, for that pavement, reverberating rather sadly, has been sullied and blackened by charred human flesh. It is known that on the day of the conflagration the church was full of wounded Germans lying on straw mattresses, which caught fire, and a scene of horror ensued, worthy of a vision of Dante; all these beings, their green wounds scorched by the flames, dragged themselves along screaming, on red stumps, trying to win through doors too narrow. Renowned, too, is the heroism of those stretcher-bearers, priests and nuns, who risked their lives in the midst of falling bombs in their attempt to save these unhappy wretches, whom their own German brothers had not even thought to spare. Yet they did not succeed in saving all; some remained and were burnt to death in the nave, leaving unseemly clots of blood on the sacred flagstones, where formerly processions of kings and queens had slowly trailed their ermine mantles to the sound of great organs and plain-song.
"Look," said my guide, showing me a wide hole in one of the aisles, "this is the work of a shell which they hurled at us yesterday evening. And now come and see the miracle."
And he leads me into the choir where the statue of Joan of Arc, preserved it may be said by some special Providence, still stands unharmed, with its eyes of gentle ecstasy.
The most irreparable disaster is the ruin of those great glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century had piously wrought in meditation and dreams, assembling together in hundreds, saints, male and female, with translucent draperies and luminous aureoles. There again German scrap-iron has crashed through in great senseless volleys, shattering everything. Irreplaceable masterpieces are scattered on the flagstones in fragments that can never be reassembled—golds, reds and blues, of which the secret has been lost. Vanished are the transparent rainbow colours, perished those saintly personages, in the pretty simplicity of their attitudes, with their small, pale, ecstatic faces; a thousand precious fragments of that glasswork, which in the course of centuries has acquired an iridescence something in the manner of opals, lie on the ground, where indeed they still shine like gems.
To-day there is silence in the basilica, as well as in the deserted square around it; a deathlike silence within these walls, which for so long had vibrated to the voice of organs and the old ritual chants of France. The cold wind alone makes a kind of music this Sunday morning, and at times when it blows harder there is a tinkling like the fall of very light pearls. It is the falling of the little that still remained in place of the beautiful glass windows of the thirteenth century, crumbling away entirely, beyond recovery.
A whole splendid cycle of our history which seemed to live in the sanctuary, with a life almost tangible, though essentially spiritual, has suddenly been plunged into the abyss of things gone by, of which even the memory will soon pass away. The great barbarism has swept through this place, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the barbarism of old times, because it is doltishly, outrageously self-satisfied, and consequently fundamental, incurable, and final—destined, if it be not crushed, to overwhelm the world in a sinister night of eclipse.
In truth it is strange how that statue of Joan of Arc in the choir has remained standing calm, intact, immaculate, without even the smallest scratch upon her gown.