The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' képi, who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant. The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon thousands of them,—singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to receive the dead of the vicinity.

Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier's képi whenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated, mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense of la patrie.

So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation, that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers' homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the wounds can be forgotten.

* * * * *

The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Épernay road, I could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city. It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets, and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells. With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments. They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions occurred within a few feet of the building.

There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims—there have not been any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people, only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence, for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old, too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies. After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no longer protect from the barbarian.

Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed mouldings and figures—irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art—have been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge, fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face, smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty. Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it was—the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can never utterly be erased from her outraged person….

A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French history,—minster of her kings,—and its destruction would be especially bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches in the lofty façade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them. The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse, bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church, who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.

What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting grave from which no German skill can resurrect it…. Within, the cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a pious search could rescue from the débris around the cathedral. In this room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his unshakable faith….

At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced—if within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the destruction of a cathedral. Rheims—unless saved by a miracle—is doomed. And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal and the Latin ideal: one must die.