It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line. We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about, gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course, is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass as art treasures. That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who said the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheims made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a piece! We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four minutes, we left town.