VI

       Table of Contents

THE PHANTOM BASILICA

       Table of Contents

      October, 1914.

      To gaze upon her, our legendary and wonderful basilica of France, to bid her a last farewell before she should crumble away to her inevitable downfall, I had ordered a détour of two hours in my service motor car at the end of some special duty from which I was returning.

      The October morning was misty and cold. The hillsides of Champagne were deserted that day, and their vineyards with dark brown leaves, wet with rain, seemed to be wrapped completely in a kind of shining fleece. We had also passed through a forest, keeping our eyes open and our weapons ready in case of a meeting with Uhlan marauders.

      At last, far away in the fog, uplifting all its great height above a sprinkling of reddish squares, doubtless the roofs of houses, we saw the form of a mighty church. This was evidently the basilica.

      At the entrance to Rheims there are defences of all kinds: stone barriers, trenches, chevaux de frise, sentinels with crossed bayonets. To gain admission it is not sufficient to be in uniform and military accoutrements; explanations have to be made and the countersign given.

      In the great city where I am a stranger, I have to ask my way to the cathedral, for it is no longer in sight. Its lofty grey silhouette, which, viewed from afar, dominated everything so imposingly, as a castle of giants would dominate the houses of dwarfs, now seems to have crouched down to hide itself.

      "To get to the cathedral," people reply, "you must first turn to the right over there, and then to the left, and then to the right, etc."

      And my motor car plunges into the crowded streets. There are many soldiers, regiments on the march, motor-ambulances in single file, but there are many ordinary footfarers, too, unconcerned as if nothing were happening, and there are even many well-dressed women, with prayer-books in their hands, in honour of Sunday.

      At a street-crossing there is a gathering of people in front of a house whose walls bear signs of recent damage, the reason being that a shell has just fallen there. It is just one of their little brutal jests, so to speak; we understand the situation, look you; it is a simple pastime, just a matter of killing a few persons, on a Sunday morning for choice, because there are more people in the streets on Sunday mornings. But it seems, indeed, as if this town had reconciled itself to its lot, to live its life watched by the remorseless binoculars, under the fire of savages lurking on the neighbouring hillside. The wayfarers stop for a moment to look at the walls and the marks made by the shell-bursts, and then they quietly continue their Sunday walk. This time, we are told, it is women and little girls who lie weltering in their blood, victims of that amiable peasantry. We hear about it, and then think no more of the matter, as if it were of the smallest importance in times such as these.

      This quarter of the town is now deserted. Houses are closed; a silence as of mourning prevails. And at the far end of a street appear the tall grey gates, the lofty pointed arches with their marvellous carvings and the soaring towers. There is no sound; there is not a living soul in the square where the phantom basilica still stands in majesty, where the wind blows cold and the sky is dark.

      The basilica of Rheims still keeps its place as if by miracle, but so riddled and rent it is, that it seems ready to collapse at the slightest shock. It gives the impression of a huge mummy, still erect and majestic, but which the least touch would turn into ashes. The ground is strewn with its precious fragments. It has been hastily enclosed with a hoarding of white wood, and within its bounds lies, in little heaps, its consecrated dust, fragments of stucco, shivered panes of glass, heads of angels, clasped hands of saints, male and female. The calcined stone-work of the tower on the left, from top to bottom, has assumed a strange colour like that of baked flesh, and the saints, still standing upright in rank on the cornices, have been decorticated, as it were, by fire. They have no longer either faces or fingers, yet, still retaining their human form, they resemble corpses ranged in rows, their contours but faintly defined under a kind of reddish shroud.

      We make a circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the hoarding which isolates the fragile, still wonderful phantom is everywhere firmly closed.

      As for the old palace attached to the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France were wont to repose on the day of their coronation, it is nothing more than a ruin, without windows or roof, blackened all over by tongues of flame.

      What a peerless jewel was this church, more beautiful even than Notre-Dame de Paris, more open to the light, more ethereal, more soaringly uplifted with its columns like long reeds, astonishingly fragile considering the weight they bear, a miracle of the religious art of France, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had wakened into being in all its mystic purity before the sensual ponderousness of that which we have agreed to call the Renaissance had come to us from Italy, materialising and spoiling all. Oh, how gross, how cowardly, how imbecile was the brutality of those who fired those volleys of scrap-iron with full force against tracery of such delicacy, that had stayed aloft in the air for centuries in confidence, no battles, no invasions, no tempests ever daring to assail its beauty.

      That great, closed house yonder in the square must be the archbishop's palace. I venture to ring at the door and request the privilege of entering the church.

      "His Eminence," I am told, "is at Mass, but would soon return, if I would wait."

      And while I am waiting, the priest, who acts as my host, tells me the history of the burning of the episcopal palace.

      "First of all they sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical preparation; then, when they threw their incendiary bombs, the woodwork burnt like straw, and everywhere you saw jets of green flame which burned with a noise like that of fireworks."

      Indeed the barbarians had long prepared with studied foresight this deed of sacrilege, in spite of their idiotically absurd pretexts and their shameless denials. That which they had desired to destroy here was the very heart of ancient France, impelled as much by some superstitious fancy as by their own brutal instincts, and upon this task they bent their whole energy, while in the rest of the town nothing else, or almost nothing, suffered damage.

      "Could no attempt be made," I ask, "to replace the burnt roof of the basilica, to cover over as soon as possible these arches, which will not otherwise withstand the ravages of next winter?"

      "Undoubtedly,"