But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells. We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some 120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the pavement there between the street-car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence, the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us along to the next street. A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how pleasant can be the sound even of noise. Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their homes even though they must live in the cellar. Now the devastation increases and the houses begin to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and mortar as we approach the Place de la Cathédrale. At length we stand before the famous Cathedral of Rheims itself. I know of no more impressive place to be in the closing days of the year 1916 than here at the front of the terrible world war.