According to the official report of the Commission of Inquiry into the German atrocities at Louvain and other places, men were brutally separated from their wives and children, and after having been subjected to abominable treatment by the Germans were herded out of the town. The corpses of many a civilian encumbered the streets and squares.] CHAPTER XVI WANTON DESTRUCTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS DESECRATION OF THE SHRINES OF HUMANITY -- THE “ROYAL CITY”--CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME -- ART TREASURES -- CATHEDRAL A TARGET -- ANGER OF CROWD STILLED BY PRIESTS--“SUPREME SACRIFICE AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF MAN”--BEAUTY IRREPARABLY GONE. If the destruction of famous buildings, shrines of humanity as well as of art and religion, were but put down to the unavoidable accidents of war, after the first poignant sense of the irreparable loss, one would rather sorrowfully accept the smoking ruins as further evidence of the horrible, if unavoidable, waste of war. But to have Louvain’s atrocities justified, to have the destruction of towns systematically brought about in a spirit of fiendish reprisal or as part of a propaganda of military terrorism, this is what revolts the world. It is this demoniacal barbarism, raised to the ultimate power for evil by modern mechanism, that staggers civilization. The sacking of Louvain had hardly ceased to be a matter of world-wide outcry against such inexcusable barbarity when there came the official report that the Cathedral of Rheims, one of the most glorious examples of Gothic art in the world and an historic monument of first rank, had fallen before the German guns in the bombardment of that historic city. THE “ROYAL CITY” Rheims has been a city of importance since the time of the Romans. The cathedral, wherein for nearly 1,000 years the kings of France were crowned, has been fittingly described as “the most perfect example in grandeur and grace of Gothic style in existence.” Hincmar, a mighty archbishop of the ninth century, once declared that Rheims was “by the appointment of Heaven a royal city.” The words are at once historical and prophetic. Here Clovis was baptized by St. Remigius, and here in the cathedral in 1429, Charles VII of France was crowned through the efforts of Joan of Arc. According to the historians of art, Rheims is royal in another sense. In no city in Europe have the life and thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found such perfect expression in architecture. From early Gothic to Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Renaissance, the buildings of Rheims reveal better than any records the city’s historical development. Of all the buildings illustrative of their various periods there were said to be no better examples than the cathedral and the church of St. Jacques, fine monuments of early Gothic; the later Gothic edifice of the archbishop’s palace, and, finally, the city hall, a handsome work of the best period of French Renaissance. CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME