CHAPTER XVI

WANTON DESTRUCTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS

DESECRATION OF THE SHRINES OF HUMANITY -- THE “ROYAL CITY”--CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME -- ART TREASURES -- CATHEDRAL A TARGET -- ANGER OF CROWD STILLED BY PRIESTS--“SUPREME SACRIFICE AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF MAN”--BEAUTY IRREPARABLY GONE.

If the destruction of famous buildings, shrines of humanity as well as of art and religion, were but put down to the unavoidable accidents of war, after the first poignant sense of the irreparable loss, one would rather sorrowfully accept the smoking ruins as further evidence of the horrible, if unavoidable, waste of war. But to have Louvain’s atrocities justified, to have the destruction of towns systematically brought about in a spirit of fiendish reprisal or as part of a propaganda of military terrorism, this is what revolts the world. It is this demoniacal barbarism, raised to the ultimate power for evil by modern mechanism, that staggers civilization.

The sacking of Louvain had hardly ceased to be a matter of world-wide outcry against such inexcusable barbarity when there came the official report that the Cathedral of Rheims, one of the most glorious examples of Gothic art in the world and an historic monument of first rank, had fallen before the German guns in the bombardment of that historic city.

THE “ROYAL CITY”

Rheims has been a city of importance since the time of the Romans. The cathedral, wherein for nearly 1,000 years the kings of France were crowned, has been fittingly described as “the most perfect example in grandeur and grace of Gothic style in existence.”

Hincmar, a mighty archbishop of the ninth century, once declared that Rheims was “by the appointment of Heaven a royal city.”

The words are at once historical and prophetic. Here Clovis was baptized by St. Remigius, and here in the cathedral in 1429, Charles VII of France was crowned through the efforts of Joan of Arc.

According to the historians of art, Rheims is royal in another sense. In no city in Europe have the life and thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found such perfect expression in architecture. From early Gothic to Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Renaissance, the buildings of Rheims reveal better than any records the city’s historical development. Of all the buildings illustrative of their various periods there were said to be no better examples than the cathedral and the church of St. Jacques, fine monuments of early Gothic; the later Gothic edifice of the archbishop’s palace, and, finally, the city hall, a handsome work of the best period of French Renaissance.

CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME

No one really knows who designed and built the cathedral. The first stones were laid in 1211, and the building, with the exception of the superb west façade, was completed in the thirteenth century. The façade, which dates from the fourteenth century, was adorned with three exquisite recessed portals containing, in a more or less good state of preservation, over five hundred statues. Of the entire structure, we read in “Cathedrals of the Isle de France”: “Nothing can exceed the majesty of its deeply recessed portals, the beauty of the rose window that surmounts them, or the elegance of the gallery that completes the façade.”

ART TREASURES

The interior, which was cruciform, was 455 feet long and 99 feet wide; the distance from the middle isle to the highest point in the roof was 125 feet. Here in niches in the walls was another multitude of statues, and in the nave and transepts were preserved valuable tapestry, representing biblical scenes and scenes from the history of medieval France. Here also hung a treasure of paintings, including canvases by Tintoretto, Nicolas Poussin, and others, and some fine old tapestries.

In the treasury were reliquaries, one said to contain a thorn from the Holy Crown, the skull of St. Remi and a collection of valuable vessels in gold, the most remarkable in France. The treasures included not only the coronation ornaments of various kings, but the vase of St. Ursula, the massive chalice of St. Remigius, and countless crucifixes in gold, silver and precious woods.

In the treasury was also preserved the Sainte Ampoule--the vessel in which the oil used to anoint the kings of France was preserved--a successor to the famous ampulla, which a dove was said to have brought from heaven filled with inexhaustible holy oil at the time of the baptism of Clovis, in 496. During the Revolution the sacred vessel was shattered, but a fragment was piously preserved, in which some of the oil was said still to remain.

CATHEDRAL A TARGET

The Cathedral of Notre Dame is now no more than an empty shell of charred and blackened walls. The fire started between four and five o’clock Sunday afternoon, September 20, 1914, after shells had been crashing into the town all day. Over five hundred fell between early morning and sunset.

The cathedral had been turned into a hospital for the German wounded, to secure for the building the protection of the Red Cross flag. When the first shell struck the roof everyone believed it was a stray shot, but later in the day a German battery four miles away, began making the great Gothic pile its target. Shell after shell crashed its way into the old masonry and stonework that had stood the storms of centuries.

At 4.30 some scaffolding around the east end of the cathedral, where repairs were going on, caught fire and soon the whole network of poles and planks was ablaze. Then the roof of old oak timbers caught fire and soon the ceilings of the nave and transepts were a roaring furnace.

The blazing piers of carved woodwork crashed to the floor, where piles of straw had been gathered in connection with the work of the field hospital. As soon as this caught fire the paneling of the altars, the chairs and other furniture were devoured.

Twenty wounded Germans would have perished by the efforts of their own countrymen if several French army doctors, with their bearers, had not carried them one by one at their own risk out of the church by one of the side doors.

ANGER OF CROWD STILLED BY PRIESTS

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?”

BEAUTY IRREPARABLY GONE

The artistic beauty of the cathedral of Rheims can never be restored, in the opinion of Whitney Warren, the New York architect, who made a thorough inspection of the structure.

Mr. Warren, who is a corresponding member of the Institut de France, was given the privilege of visiting the cathedral. His investigation had no official character, but the result of his observations was communicated to Myron T. Herrick, American Ambassador to Belgium.

“That anything remains of the edifice,” said Mr. Warren, “is due to the strong construction of the walls and vaults which are of a robustness that can resist even modern implements of war.”

The building was not battered by the heavier guns, as had been feared, but it suffered most from shrapnel fire. The famous rose windows, the sculpture and other details of the façade that were ruined are, however, just the examples of art that can not be replaced.

Statues, gargoyles, and other ornaments on the exterior of the cathedral have been tumbled to the pavement and shattered, though at first glance the outer walls of the cathedral do not show the ruin that has taken place. These blackened walls yet stand as a monument to the glory of France, but still more as a grim reminder of the barbarity of German warfare.