The interior of the Cathedral, blurred with a half-inch layer of stone dust, is in most ‘unchurchly’ disorder. Four or five shells have torn large holes through the roof of the nave, and twice as many more have played havoc with the chapels and aisles at the side. One has fallen through the gilded canopy over the high altar and broken one of the four supporting columns, which before were monoliths like those of St. Peter’s at Rome. Of course, most of the stained glass windows are scattered in fragments over the floor, and through the openings on the southern side I could see the ruins of the cloisters, with some chairs and a bed literally falling into them from a room of the Bishop’s Palace above. This destruction of the Cathedral is typical of the purposeless barbarity of the whole proceeding. The wiping out of the town can serve no military purpose. There are no stores of munitions or railway communications to be demolished. Naturally there are no troops quartered in the town, and now all extensive movements of convoys are conducted by other roads than those leading through the town. Yet the bombardment continues day after day, and week after week. The Germans are sending in about £5,000,000 worth of shells a month. ‘It’s spite,’ a _poilu_ said to me; ‘they have made up their minds to destroy the town since they can’t capture it; but it will be very valuable as an iron mine after the war.’ _THE SPINE OF AN EMPIRE._ BY MAJOR-GEN. G. F. MACMUNN, C.B., D.S.O. _In Agypt’s land on banks of Noile_ _King Pharaoh’s royal daughter went to bath in shtoile;_ _She had her dip and hied into the land,_ _To dry her royal pelt she ran along the sand._ _A Bulrush thripped her and at her foot she saw_ _The little Moases, in a wad of sthraw._ Fragment, _The Finding of Moses_, ANON. Never in the cinema of all time have there been such films to record as on the stage of Egypt. Certain localities are preordained to attract the come and go of the world, and before all others the Nile delta has this property. Its strategical location in the world’s assembling has compelled the holders of power and might and majesty and dominion to crowd therein. No decay of empires can affect the significance of geographical siting. Mena and Cheops and Khefren give place to Amenemhats and Thotmes and a host of Rameses, who yield in turn to such modernities as the Ptolemies, but the Nile remains the Nile, and the Red Sea the waterway from East to West. As Darius and Xerxes and Alexander were compelled by the call of strategical law, so came Salah-ud-Din and Napoleon and Ferdinand de Lesseps and Sir Garnet Wolseley. And here, too, would come William of Hohenzollern, boasting to break the spine of the British Empire, in the vertebræ that Chesney planned and De Lesseps made.