In all the devastation in or near the cathedral, Dubois's statue of Jeanne d'Arc in front of the great doors is yet (June 26) untouched. The legs of the horse are chipped by fragments of flying shell, but the maid rides serenely above. In her hands she holds the tricolor, and at the foot of the pedestal had been placed wreaths and fresh flowers. The people of Rheims look upon her invulnerability as a good omen.

Returning to Epernay for the night through the dusk, we passed companies of infantry moving up to relieve those at the front, the French trenches at Bétheny are only a little over a mile outside of Rheims, and motor-transports and wagons waiting at the depots to carry up their supplies to the lines under cover of the darkness.

We spent a restless night in an uncomfortable little hotel kept by a very pretty landlady. There was a glow in the sky over Rheims, and through the wakeful hours sounded the drone of an aeroplane on patrol duty over the town.

June 27.

Our staff-captain waked me at dawn. Through a crisp, dewy morning we drove back over the same road to Rheims. The cars were halted at the gates. There was some doubt about our being allowed to pass in. The French had captured some trenches in the Argonne, and the Germans had retaliated by a Sunday-morning bombardment of the cathedral; the shelling had begun at daybreak. After a little discussion, our Indian-fighter of the day before relented, and we went ahead. This time the cars did not bring us up to the cathedral doors; we left, them in a more sheltered spot in a narrow street near at hand.

Borne down on the wind, which had changed to the northwest, was the crackle of artillery fire and the noise of explosive shells from the plateau and the valley. We walked about the cathedral. A sixinch shell had dropped in the little sheltered spot in the rear and torn a hole in the ground; except for this, the salvo was

without result. We went inside. Sainsalieu, the architect, and the others did not remove their hats. I wondered why. It was because the sanctuary had been violated and the sacrament removed; the great cathedral was no longer a house of God. It was Sunday morning, but there were no services, no priests intoning the mass, no heavy roll of the organ, only the echo of our muffled voices in the vaulted spaces above.

Sainsalieu, who has been working steadily inside the building on his plans for its restoration through so many weeks of bombardment that the whistle of shells means nothing to him, gave me his chair and table to aid me in my drawing; then he gave me a key. The cathedral is carefully locked up at all times. There is a gate in the fence beyond the sand-bags that protect the sculpture at the base of the building, and a small wooden door in place of the heavy one in the right portal. The same key opens both, and also another little door on the right as you enter. This little inside door is as tempting as the one that led to Bluebeard's closet for his headless wives. I was asked to give my word of honor that I would not open it, for it leads to the stairway that climbs up through the southwest tower to the roof. No one is allowed on the roof, so careful are the French authorities that the Germans shall not be given the slightest excuse for bombarding the building under the pretext that it is being used for observation purposes.

Sainsalieu made me promise not to give the key to any one, but to keep it until I met him at déjeuner at the Hôtel du Nord. Then he went with the others to Bétheny, and I locked myself in. It was awesomely quiet within the great building as I went on with my work. The desultory fire of the guns to the north was muffled. It was apparently no more threatening than the cooing of the pigeons in the vast dome overhead. There was a flutter of wings when a shell exploded in the direction of the Place Royale, and I started when a shower of glass, loosened from its setting by the wind, crashed

down on the flagstones of the nave. This was the only interruption. When I left, I carefully locked the door, then I closed the gate, and locked it behind me. A man who had apparently been waiting outside asked me for the key to the cathedral. Remembering my promise, I refused to give it to him. He was willing enough to engage me in conversation, but this was no place, I thought, for a parley. The parvis was strangely silent, and, except for us two, deserted. There was a profound stillness in the town, the midday lull in the firing while both sides were at dinner; but there was never any telling when the racket might start up again.

I went on through lonely streets, past houses with broken shutters, windows agape, walls spattered with shot-holes, and chimneys leaning precariously over the street, to the rendezvous at the Hôtel du Nord, the only hotel now open in Rheims. Sainsalieu was not there. We were almost through luncheon when a hasty courier arrived in the person of a boy on a bicycle, who, clothed with the proper authority, begged that the American gentleman give him the key to the cathedral.

Afternoon found us scooting along the road to Soissons, the same route nationale I had known in my motor-tours that had carried me westward to Compiègne, Beauvais, Rouen, and Havre. Long lines of poplars shot by in a blur; the roar of the motor echoed in the swish, swish as we rushed past the boles of the trees. A flock of sheep turned out of a lane, an incongruously peaceful note in an atmosphere of big guns and destruction. We left the main road shortly, and edged our way toward the front through protected byways or between the walls of old, gray villages. We climbed a slope, interviewed another brigade commander, left the cars in a protected place, and walked into the depths of a thickly wooded forest. From the outside it looked peaceful enough-a mass of dark green on a ridge above a slumbering hamlet. There was nothing to suggest that within its shadows bristling guns

were sunken in well-concealed emplacements, that the heavy foliage hid the position of the 41st Battery of Artillery. They had the usual complement of "75's," with an anti-air-craft gun and a huge "caterpillar," with its gray nose pointed down into the ground to avoid detection. by the watchful Germans on the hills beyond.

The stables were cunningly hidden in the thick of the wood. The stalls were covered with green boughs. The battery has been in the same position since last November, and every horse had its name over the stall, like an old-time fire-engine house in New York-LeBeau, Victoire, L'Hermite, Marie Louise.

The quarters of the men were in wellprotected underground huts covered with timbers and saplings. They had rough sketches on the walls and flowers in vases. In cages were magpies and small songbirds, and a musician had rigged up a xylophone by hanging wine-bottles containing different amounts of water on a sapling suspended between two trees. On this he played selections from the operas. Near by, almost at his feet, was the grave of one of his comrades.

On the grave were fresh flowers and a wreath, and an inscription roughly cut with a knife on a piece of board, "François, our friend, dead on the field of honor." The artilleryman tinkled the "William Tell" overture on his musical glasses. He wore a tight-fitting jacket like a Zouave's, and as I stood listening to his concert I was reminded of that splendid story of the Zouaves I had just heard in Paris. A regiment of them overreached itself in a charge in the Argonne. It was cut off by the enemy, and virtually wiped out. The Germans, adopting tactics that have been unheard of in modern warfare, costumed themselves in the uniforms of the dead men. As they moved back to attack the French lines, they pushed a few of the survivors in front of them. From the trenches the missing regiment of Zouaves appeared, straggling along the hillside. It closed in until, as it was almost upon them, the French

heard a voice from the advancing host shout, "In the name of God! Fire!"

The name of the soldier who died in the volley from his own lines is unknown. His exploit was read to the armies in the order of the day.

It was a quiet afternoon along this part of the front. It was quiet, rather, until, as we were looking at a blue-gray "75," with its muzzle pointed out of a bough of leaves, an order came by telephone, and a shell was slipped into the timing mechanism. A dial was set; in a few seconds the shell was withdrawn and locked in the breech of the gun, and an officer pulled a lanyard. There was a report,—not so loud a report as I had expected, -a whiff of smoke came from the breech, and the shell had gone on its mission to an invisible enemy beyond the slope, while the leaves overhead, hiding the gray muzzle, settled back into place.

I read the story of a correspondent who boasted that five shells were fired for his special benefit. I prefer to think that this one was fired for France.

June 28.

Sweaters and raincoats were needed in the morning, for a cold wind out of the northwest brought with it a dismal rain

a day more like October than June. We were up near the front an hour after we had left the hotel. With the general and his staff we were perched on the observation-platform at division headquarters. The general, with the aid of a large scale-map, which he held down with difficulty in the wind, described the fighting in his sector. A mist hung over the valley in front of us. Little white puffs rolled back from time to time as the curtain lifted-shrapnel exploding over the French trenches close to the river.

At our feet were the extensive stables and courtyard of an old farmstead, not unlike the fortified manoirs of Normandy. The yard was filled with cavalrymen grooming their horses. One seldom sees horses so close to the front lines. Directly below, with a guard watching nonchalantly over them, was a group in

the peculiar gray-green of the German infantry. They were prisoners from that other France across the river Aisne. They seemed to accept their new environment philosophically, and with the resignation of stoics they went methodically about the unmartial task of sweeping out the stableyard.

IN SOISSONS

ONLY once in my motor-tours had I driven through Soissons. I had a hazy memory of a sleepy little town, of staring white houses, of narrow streets with unsteady chimneys above the tiled roofs, a lime-bordered market-place, a partly ruined abbey, and a fine old cathedral-a town at peace with the world after a strenuous history, prosperous, but not aggressively so. In the present war Soissons has suffered far more than Rheims, its neighbor to the east. Again, as at Rheims, there is a wide swath cut in the line of the German fire. Again, part of the former prosperous business section is laid waste. In the Rue du Commerce, the Rue de la Congregation, the Rue du College, and the district to the northeast near the river most of the houses are mere shells, and fires are smoldering in the debris.

To make a ruin out of a ruin seems a waste of time. A shell, with only its twin towers and part of its thirteenth-century cloisters remaining, St. Jean des Vignes could serve no strategic purpose. The reason for the heavy fire directed at it is incomprehensible. In the war of 1870 the façade was damaged by the heavy German projectiles and the points of the arches were calcined by the flames. In the present series of bombardments there has been a more systematic effort to demolish what was left of the structure. A part of the stone shaft surmounting the left tower has been carried off, and there are ragged gashes in the arched openings. The top of the tower on the right has been shot away, and the hammering of shells and incendiary bombs has left its marks across the entire façade. The little statue at the central apex of the arch is gone, the platform supporting the arched portals

badly cracked, and the tiles smashed into powder.

The wreck of the cathedral is more appalling. A solid old pile, it dates from the twelfth century, and is an excellent example of combined Gothic and Romanesque design. It has withstood many sieges, but its massive construction was no proof against the assaults of modern guns. Eighty shells were thrown into the building by high-angle fire in the first few days after the enemy was established on the plateau to the north. The fine stainedglass of the Gothic windows is smashed, and the tombs are crushed in. There is an enormous hole in the roof of the apse, through which a flood of sunlight streams. across a fallen column. Though every stone of it is separate, the column still preserves its outline, with the carved capital intact, like a fallen giant.

The French particularly resent the devastation of Soissons. In the FrancoPrussian War, when the Germans entered the town after a four days' siege, they shot up some of the citizens, -a monument to their memory stood in the Place de la Republic,-but the damage. they inflicted on its ancient monuments was comparatively slight. Though civilization has advanced nearly half a century since then, this time the Germans have spared neither the civil population nor the ancient monuments.

In the present case the threadbare excuse of military necessity falls flat. In Paris, the minister of fine arts, M. Dalimier, particularly called our attention to the fact that the cathedral tower and the Abbey of St. Jean des Vignes would be useless for observation purposes for the simple reason that a ridge higher than their highest pinnacles intervenes between the northern edge of the town and the German lines.

July 7.

After the long Allied line that begins at Ypres and stretches south until it turns eastward above Compiègne was straightened out, the heaviest fighting centered about Arras and the surrounding country. The Germans have again and again at

tempted to drive a wedge through the Arras sector. They have been hammering away with a definite object in view, namely, to turn the left wing of Maud'huy's 10th Corps and cut off the British army to the north, leaving it with an overwhelming German force in front and with only the channel ports behind it.

The drive has not succeeded. But what of Arras in the meantime? It would take the imagination of Doré to visualize the saddening ruins of the former capital of Artois.

We approached the town from the direction of Doullens, where our headquarters had been established. We clung to the route nationale for only a short distance, because for virtually all of the thirty-six kilometers it comes within range of the German guns.

So after a short dash we turned off to the left, to edge our way forward through sheltered country byways. We passed through Lucheux, a little hamlet with a picturesque arched stone gate standing in the roadway.

I had no sooner remarked upon the peasants working in the fields and the farmers' carts in the inn courtyards before. both disappeared. In their places appeared the tents of the farriers' camps, Red-Cross trucks, commissary-wagons, military motors, artillery batteries in reserve, repair-shops, horses, men, and munitions-all the numerous cogs that fit into the vast organization behind the actual fighting-line of the army.

Other small villages passed. We drove into little valleys and out again, or crept along embankments where the road had been cut deeper to afford protection. The crackle of the guns, which at first was only a distant roar, was growing nearer. Our motors advanced in a series of charges, dashing past an open space at cup-race speed, slowing down in a ravine. or where the walls at the roadside sheltered us, then shooting ahead again. I was becoming accustomed to these short spurts, but I never ceased to wonder why we were not as likely to run into a shell as to be caught on the wing by one.

A blight had fallen upon the landscape, and the sun had disappeared, when, beyond Dainville, we crept gingerly back to the route nationale. At the end of the long white road ahead a fierce bombardment was in progress. Straightened out on the highway, we waited for a signal, and then rushed through the zone raked by the enemy's fire up to the town gates of Arras.

A sentry stepped out of the box at the octroi and demanded the password. The sign-posts of the Touring Club of France, "Doullens 25 kilometers," "Amiens 60 kilometers," still marked the distances along the road, but the blue of the signs was faded, and the lettering indistinct. The tire and chocolate advertisements on the sign-boards lining the roads still remained, scarred with shrapnel and full of shot-holes.

We went in, the cars turning aside from time to time to avoid the debris of toppled walls and chimneys that littered the streets. The cobbles were strewn with rusty fragments of shell, grass grew in the interstices and in the cracks between the paving-stones, and broken telephone and telegraph wires hung in festoons from their fastenings. There was no sign of life, unless you call the clatter of shells overhead a sign of life, until, after leaving the cars in a protected spot, we went to headquarters to pay our respects to the general in command. He was a cheerful, stout man, so like General Joffre in appearance that my photograph of him might easily pass for one of the generalissimo himself.

He complained of the spies. His headquarters had been moved two days before, and already the Germans knew the whereabouts of the staff. In proof of this he showed us a large cavity in the garden at the rear where a "marmite" had exploded that morning. He also showed us a shellhole in the wall of the house. The shell had swept down the cut-glass chandelier, loosened the plaster of the walls, and demolished a mahogany sideboard, a beautiful mahogany table, and mahogany chairs. Still undamaged, the old-rose window

curtains moved gently in the breeze that came in through the opening.

The general took us to his sleepingapartment in the cellar. A very cool and pleasant place, he said, but he had to bolster up with sand-bags the grating upon which he depended for light and air because of the flying shrapnel in the street outside.

In a drizzle of rain we crossed a deso

late little square. Arras was like a city of the dead: it gave one something of the sensation of walking through the ghostly cairns of Pompeii, or St.-Pierre, Martinique. Lowering clouds and the yellow smoke of incendiary bombs hung like a pall overhead. Despite the intermittent crackle of gun-fire, we unconsciously lowered our voices. A leaning chimney, all that remained of the one-time residence of some prosperous merchant, toppled over as we looked at it. A cloud of dust rose as it crashed into the ruins below. Through the wet blanket of rain the outlines of broken walls and blackened rooftrees were hazy and indistinct.

At the end of a cul-de-sac, the shells tearing through the narrow street had blown out the walls of a house from beneath its roof. Beyond the gaunt opening tottering chimneys and blackened rafters showed through the yellow haze in the distance. Underneath, in the smoking ruins, window-blinds, doors, stairways, old bed-posts, and bits of furniture were shuffled up with bricks and stones in artistic confusion. Above, the red-tiled roof, undamaged, and with a little white curtain still hanging in the dormer-window, hung suspended like a bridge from the walls on each side.

There was a sudden lull in the cannonading, as though both sides, breathless, had stopped at a given signal. We could hear the echo of our footsteps on the cobbles. We came out into the district of shops. An épicerie displayed tins of American canned goods in its broken windows; there was not a whole pane of glass in the city. The grocer conducted his business in the cellar. In a narrow street a few vegetables and some fruit