Even the cathedral seemed to me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the sculptures of the facade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age, than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais, or Chartres or Rouen.

But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever one looked, of that old spell of _la douce France_! And now! Under the pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few signs of patching up and returning habitation.

And in the great square before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of provincial and commercial life--_ruin!_--only intensified by a group of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour's wait would enable them to see.

There in front of the great portal stood the Prime Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop--heroic Cardinal Lucon, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd.

And above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front, blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist, and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.
The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of glass or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the pleading powers of the spirit.