(PLATES 88 TO 97.)

Rheims shares with Ypres and Verdun the glory of having successfully withstood a continuous four years' siege, and with Ypres the additional distinction of having been for a long time the central point in an extraordinarily narrow salient, surrounded by the enemy practically on three sides. It is truly an ancient storm centre, unsuccessfully besieged by the English in the fourteenth century, taken by them in the fifteenth (perhaps more by intrigue than by fighting), and held until Joan of Arc turned us out after nine years' occupation. It was entered by the Germans on the 4th of September, 1870, and again on the forty-fourth anniversary of that day in 1914. But while after 1870 they held the city for two years, in 1914 they had to evacuate it after nine days only. They commenced immediately to shell it, and, according to the universal opinion in France, to shell particularly the cathedral, in spite of official assurances that it was not used for observation purposes, which anyone but a Prussian would have believed. The north tower, unfortunately, was under repair in 1914, and covered with timber scaffolding. An incendiary shell set fire to this a week after the Germans had left the city, and the whole of the roof of the cathedral was burnt. Later on the vaulting over the transept and the choir was badly but not irreparably damaged (the statement is made that a number of Germans—the church being used as a hospital—were killed by a shell which penetrated the vaulting), and the chevet at the east end is very badly knocked about. The west end, happily, has not suffered so much, the direction of firing being generally from Brimont and Nogent l'Abesse, respectively north and east of the city. One is glad to know that it was found possible to save a certain amount of the fine stained glass.

In thinking of the fate of Rheims from the point of view of the French, it is to be remembered that to them the cathedral stands in much the same relation as does Westminster Abbey to us. It is not perhaps the finest, nor the most beautiful, nor the largest of the glorious churches of France, but it is the one which, more than any other, represents in itself and its associations the faith and the history and the life of the country over many centuries and through endless changes and vicissitudes. Considering the mentality of the Germans—as judged by the sentiments of their newspapers at the time—it may probably have been the very consciousness of the special affection of the French for the cathedral that induced them to make it their special target.

The figures which are given as to the number of shells fired, and specially the number fired at the cathedral in 1914, and on certain days in 1917, are almost unbelievable.[37]

The city has, or had before the war, about 115,000 inhabitants and some 14,000 houses. Of the latter an English visitor in 1918 informed me that about 2,000 had escaped with little damage and were more or less habitable, 2,000 more might be said to be still standing, while the remaining 10,000 were entirely destroyed. (As a comparison it may be remembered that in the Great Fire of London about 13,000 houses are said to have been burnt, or destroyed to limit the flames.)

Plate 88 is simply an example of the state of the greater part of the city, after, of course, the wreckage had been cleared off the roadways and things in general "tidied up." Plates 89 and 90 show respectively the west end of the cathedral, with its towers, and the chevet at the east end seen across a mass of ruined houses. I am afraid that the glass of the great rose windows was destroyed very early, before it could be removed, and at the east end much of the tracery of the windows has been smashed. It is in no way to the credit of the Germans, either in their intentions or in their shooting, that the damage has not been immensely greater. One may be permitted to hope that in the reconstruction of the city, which is proceeding apace, advantage will be taken of the clearance which has become unavoidable to leave such space round the building as will allow its magnificence to be more fully seen than has hitherto been possible.

After having to evacuate the city in 1914, the Germans made a very determined stand to the north at the Fort of Brimont, six miles away, as well as on the east at about the same distance, and even the desperate fighting of April, 1917, failed to move them. For the greater part of the war the French and Germans were facing each other on a north and south line a little to the east of the road from Rheims to Laon. But on their side the enemy succeeded in getting closer to the city, and the shelling must often have been at very close range, a condition of affairs more like that at Ypres than at Verdun. At one time in 1917 the Germans actually got for a day into the northern cemetery, just outside the city and only a couple of miles from the cathedral.

The remains of the French front line to the east of the Laon road were still not cleared away on my visit, the barbed-wire entanglements hardly visible above the thick growth of rank herbage. The road itself, running on a slight embankment, in places covers numerous dugouts, their entrances facing westward.

The end of September, 1918, saw the city freed at last, the Germans hastily evacuating the forts in their great retreat.

In the great retreat of the Germans in 1914 the Aisne was reached on the 12th of September, after Soissons had been in enemy occupation for ten days, during which heavy requisitions were made, although no pillage is said to have occurred. The first battle of the Aisne, the end of the German retreat in 1914, continued well into September, British artillery aiding the French north of Soissons, and Haig's troops, being farther east, attempting to reach the Chemin des Dames plateau above Troyon. But the Germans had had time to entrench themselves in the enormously strong positions afforded by the upper ground, and all the efforts of the Allies failed to dislodge them. They remained substantially unmoved until 1917, by which time they also held a sharp salient between Missy and Chavonne which had carried them across to the southern bank of the Aisne. By the beginning of 1915 the French held the valleys of Cuffies and Crouy, with the ridge between them and the western end of the high ground to the east. On the 12th-13th of January they were attacked by greatly superior numbers by Von Kluck, and, by the misfortune that floods on the Aisne had carried away their bridges higher up the stream, were cut off from their supplies, and had to retire south of the river, losing the bridge-head on the north bank. Soissons itself, however, was not captured, although the Germans remained within very easy shelling distance of it.

The Aisne winds along a flat valley bottom in great bends, always bounded on the north by high ground, which rises some 400 to 450 feet above the river, and is traversed by steep and narrow wooded ravines very much like Surrey combes, which were occupied and fully utilised by the enemy. Along the top of the plateau runs from west to east the road which became so familiar to us as the "Chemin des Dames," although this picturesque name did not appear on the maps. The main road from Soissons to Laon crosses the western end of the plateau close to the Malmaison Fort; its eastern end passes through Craonne, and the ground falls quickly down to the level of the Rheims-Laon road at Corbeny. Every foot of the "Ladies' Road" has been fought over; the whole plateau is shell-pocked almost as badly as ground beside the Amiens-PÉronne road on the Somme, and the road itself is in many places no longer distinguishable, the whole area being thickly overgrown with rank herbage. Plate 91 gives some idea of what the once well-marked road now looks like where it crosses the Troyon road, the route by which Haig's troops tried in vain to reach and hold the high ground. The village of Cerny, close to the crossing, is wiped out, some hint only of its former position being indicated by the remains of what has probably been a sugar factory (Plate 92).

In many places on the slopes above the Aisne there are quarries and natural caves, greatly enlarged and very fully utilised in the German defence. Plate 93 shows one of these caves at Crouy, a now ruined village a couple of miles above Soissons on the side of the valley in which runs the little stream that descends from Laffaux on the north to the Aisne at Soissons. Beside and across this stream our artillery had hard fighting in 1914, in the vain attempt to dislodge the enemy from the high ground above and to the west, at a time when the Germans could fire twenty shells to one of ours.

The Aisne valley remained in general fairly quiescent from 1914 until April, 1917, when General Nivelle, after his great success at Verdun, planned the gigantic blow at the German front from Soissons to the Argonne, which, in spite of its ultimate success in carrying nearly the whole of the Chemin des Dames, failed to relieve Rheims,[38] and by falling so far short of the hoped-for and too optimistically predicted success helped to cause considerable, although happily only temporary, discontent in parts of the French Army, which was only cleared away by the magnificent way in which PÉtain showed his men a few months later, both on the Aisne and at Verdun, that they still remained more than a match for their opponents.

The last battle of the Aisne formed the third of the series of great advances which Ludendorff had made in March and April, 1918. In each of the first two the Allies had been driven back so far and so definitely as to enable the Germans to claim overwhelming victory. But each of them, all the same, had finally found the victorious troops face to face with undefeated and immovable armies, and found them also too exhausted to press forward to gain those objectives which had constituted the real intention of each advance. The third Aisne battle was destined to have a similar conclusion. The German intentions had been well concealed, and their enormous concentration of troops had not been discovered, so that the attack which started suddenly on the 27th of May swept everybody off the ridge and down to the Aisne at once. The British 9th Corps (four divisions) were on the French right, brought there to rest after their hard fighting farther north! They held on at Craonne for a while, but were hopelessly outnumbered, and had to fall back with the rest of the troops. The Aisne and the Vesle were lost, and in three days the Germans had reached the Marne, and held ten miles of the river between ChÂteau Thierry and Dormans. Soissons fell on the 28th and ChÂteau Thierry a few days later, but the right, on which was still our 9th Corps, beside the French Fifth Army and some fine Italian troops, held back the invaders and succeeded in keeping them at a distance from Rheims and Epernay. Then followed counter-attacks, which were sometimes successful, and a month's quiescence, until on the 15th of July Ludendorff started the Friedensturm which was to have brought him peace—a German peace—but which ended in his utter ruin.

The Oise and Aisne Canal reaches (and crosses) the Aisne close to the foot of the road up to Troyon. The canal was no doubt dry during the war, as it was when I saw it afterwards (Plate 94), the bridge on the main road, destroyed during the German retreat, having been replaced by another.

North of the Aisne, from Soissons to Berry-au-Bac, all the villages except one appeared to be in ruins.

The whole of the country south of the Aisne to the Vesle, and again south to the Marne, was fought over in 1914, and again in the German advance in May, 1918, as well as in their final retreat in July and August. The villages, so far as I saw them, were in ruins—such, for example, as Fismes (Plate 95)—but were still recognisable as villages without the necessity, as on the Somme, of a notice-board on the roadside saying "This was ..."

Soissons itself was never far enough from the German lines to be free from shell-fire until October, 1917; it has not been, however, nearly so completely destroyed as Rheims, a reasonable number of houses remaining habitable in the end of 1918. The Germans entered it again in May, 1918, and remained in possession for two months, and during this occupation they had apparently repented of their moderation four years before, for they pillaged and stole systematically, and destroyed wantonly what they did not wish to steal.

The beautiful towers and spires of the west front of St. Jean des Vignes (Plate 96), which were all that remained of the once noble church, are a good deal damaged. It is stated that this church was pulled down in 1805 on the demand of the Bishop of Soissons in order to provide material for the repair of the cathedral, but that the two towers and spires were spared on the entreaty of the inhabitants.[39] Certainly only the skeleton of the west end with the towers has been in existence for a very long time. Apparently there have been other Huns than the Germans! The cathedral itself (Plate 97) has actually been cut in half and its one tower (the northern tower had never been built) knocked to pieces. The cathedral, although a small one, was a very beautiful structure, and was more or less unique in being arranged as two churches, one lying east and west, and the other across the transepts at right angles. The view in Plate 97 was taken in 1920 across what is now a fine open space, but which was, on my pre-war visits to the city, covered closely with houses and shops, and in 1919 was still a mass of broken walls and stone rubbish. It can be said, at any rate, that the view of the cathedral—or what is left of it—is certainly much more complete and effective than it ever had been before.

West of Soissons the destruction of villages continues for seven or eight miles along the valley, as far as Pontarchet, but still farther west, and to the south in the CompiÈgne forest, there are very few signs of fighting.