At 4.30 some scaffolding around the east end of the cathedral, where repairs were going on, caught fire and soon the whole network of poles and planks was ablaze. Then the roof of old oak timbers caught fire and soon the ceilings of the nave and transepts were a roaring furnace. The blazing piers of carved woodwork crashed to the floor, where piles of straw had been gathered in connection with the work of the field hospital. As soon as this caught fire the paneling of the altars, the chairs and other furniture were devoured. Twenty wounded Germans would have perished by the efforts of their own countrymen if several French army doctors, with their bearers, had not carried them one by one at their own risk out of the church by one of the side doors. ANGER OF CROWD STILLED BY PRIESTS There a grim scene was only prevented by the courage of the priests of the cathedral. A crowd of about two hundred citizens had come out to watch the terrible spectacle. As these Germans, in their uniforms, appeared at the transept door howls of uncontrollable passion went up from the crowd. “Kill them!” they shouted. Soldiers in the crowd leveled their rifles, when Abbé Andrieux sprang forward between the wounded men and the muzzles that threatened them. “Don’t fire,” he shouted, “you would make yourselves as guilty as they.” The reproach was enough, and amid fierce hooting and angry cries the Germans were carried to shelter in the museum near by. From the hills the flaming cathedral was an even more impressive sight than in the streets of the town. From the yawning roof the red glare poured up into the dark sky and its windows flickered with dancing flames. So night closed down. Not for long was its stillness undisturbed. At two o’clock German batteries opened fire again. Then from windows that looked toward Rheims across the plain one could watch the lurid sight of night bombardment. At last daybreak came, a sad gray dawn, with cold, dispiriting rain falling. When the shadows had lifted and enough light had filtered through the low, lead-colored clouds for one to see across the plain, the ravished city, with its ruined cathedral standing stark against the background and a vast wall of smoke rising slowly from the still flaming ruins, was as desolate a thing as the sun could well have found in its journey round the world that morning. “SUPREME SACRIFICE AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF MAN” “Will not every artist, every writer, every lover of the beautiful, unite with us in a protestation of horror against the infamous destruction of Rheims Cathedral?” wrote Emile Hovelaque, French Inspector General of Public Instruction, in a letter to the London Times. “It was the cradle of our kings, the high altar of our race, a sanctuary and shrine dear from every memory, sacred in every thought, loved as our remotest past, an ever-speaking witness to the permanence through change of the ideals, aspirations and dreams of our country.