There is a French flag there now. [And the last time I saw
Rheims Cathedral was in a spring twilight, when the great west
window glowed, and the only lights within were those of
candles which some penitent English had lit in Joan's honour
on those same candlesticks.] The high altar was covered with
floor-carpets; the pavement tiles were cracked and jarred out
by the rubbish that had fallen from above, the floor was
gritty with dust of glass and powdered stone, little twists of
leading from the windows, and iron fragments. Two great doors
had been blown inwards by the blast of a shell in the
Archbishop's garden, till they had bent grotesquely to the
curve of a cask. There they had jammed. The windows--but the
record has been made, and will be kept by better hands than
mine. It will last through the generation in which the Teuton
is cut off from the fellowship of mankind--all the long, still
years when this war of the body is at an end, and the real war
begins. Rheims is but one of the altars which the heathen
have put up to commemorate their own death throughout all the
world. It will serve. There is a mark, well known by now,
which they have left for a visible seal of their doom. When
they first set the place alight some hundreds of their wounded
were being tended in the Cathedral.
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