houses have all been treated alike. The facade may stand, the roof
may have fallen in entirely or only partially, floors may have
disappeared altogether or may still be clinging at odd angles to the
walls--the middle of every building is the same: a vast heap of what
once was the material of a home or a business, and what now is
foul rubbish. In many instances the shells have revealed the
functioning of the home at its most intimate, and that is seen which
none should see. Indignation rises out of the heart. Amid stacks of
refuse you may distinguish a bath, a magnificent fragment of mirror,
a piece of tapestry, a saucepan. In a funeral shop wreaths still hang
on their hooks for sale. Telephone and telegraph wires depend in a
loose tangle from the poles. The clock of the Protestant church has
stopped at a quarter to six. The shells have been freakish. In one
building a shell harmlessly made a hole in the courtyard large
enough to bury every commander of a German army; another
shell--a 210 mm.--went through an inner wall and opened up the
cellars by destroying 150 square feet of ground-floor: ten people
were in the cellars, and none was hurt. Uninjured signs of cafes and
shops, such as "The Good Hope," "The Success of the Day," meet
your gaze with sardonic calm.

The inhabitants of this quarter, and of other quarters in Rheims,
have gone. Some are dead. Others are picnicking in Epernay, Paris,
elsewhere. They have left everything behind them, and yet they
have left nothing. Each knows his lot in the immense tragedy.
Nobody can realise the whole of the tragedy. It defies the mind; and,
moreover, the horror of it is allayed somewhat by the beautiful forms
which ruin--even the ruin of modern ugly architecture--occasionally
takes. The effect of the pallor of a bedroom wall-paper against
smoke-blackened masonry, where some corner of a house sticks