Page:Women Wanted.djvu/59

 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 overa 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