"Look!" says my guide to me, showing me a large hole in one of the aisles, "that is the work of a shell which they fired at us yesterday evening; then come and see a miracle." And he leads me into the choir, where the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, preserved, one would say, by some special grace, is still there, intact, with eyes of gentle ecstasy. The most irreparable loss is that of the great stained glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century so religiously composed, in meditation and dream, gathering the saints by hundreds, with their translucent draperies, their luminous halos. There also German scrap-iron rushed in great stupid bundles, crushing everything. The masterpieces, which no one will ever reproduce, have scattered their fragments on the flagstones, forever impossible to separate, the golds, the reds, the blues, whose secret is lost. Ended, the rainbow transparencies, ended, the graceful, naive attitudes of all these holy people, with their pale little ecstatic faces; the thousands of precious fragments of these stained glass windows which, in the course of centuries, had little by little become iris-tinted like opals, are lying on the ground--where they still shine like jewels.... A whole splendid cycle of our history, which seemed to go on living in this sanctuary, with a life almost terrestrial, though immaterial, has just been plunged suddenly into the abyss of things that are ended, whose very memory will soon perish. The Great Barbarity has passed by, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the ancient, because it is stupidly and outrageously self-satisfied, and, in consequence, fundamental, incurable, final--destined, if it be not crushed, to throw a sinister night of eclipse over the world.... Verily, this Jeanne d'Arc in the choir has very strangely remained, untouched, immaculate, in the midst of the disorder, with not even the slightest scratch on her dress.... The English Falsehood By Sven Hedin Early in the war Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and writer, visited the German front to see the world-war at first hand. "A People in Arms," published in Leipzig and dedicated to the German soldiers, is the result. A preface proclaims the author's neutrality as a Swede and announces that he "swears before God that I have written not a line which is not the truth and have depicted nothing which I have not witnessed with my own eyes." This article is one of his concluding sketches.