_The Germans cut ninety recesses in the columns and walls of the Cathedral (two are seen in the photograph) for the purpose of placing mine charges in them and destroying the whole building when they evacuated the town. The unexpected arrival of the French frustrated this diabolical plan, but the holes and the blocks cut from them remain as witnesses._] [Illustration: _PLATE LXXXVII._ RIBÉCOURT. _This was one of the villages which were taken in the Cambrai battle, and retained in the possession of the Allies. They are all equally destroyed, but some are already half rebuilt._] [Illustration: _PLATE LXXXVIII._ RHEIMS. _This bit of Rheims--tidied up--is a fair example of the condition to which perhaps 10,000 out of its 14,000 houses have been reduced._] XI.--RHEIMS, THE AISNE, SOISSONS (PLATES 88 TO 97.) Rheims shares with Ypres and Verdun the glory of having successfully withstood a continuous four years' siege, and with Ypres the additional distinction of having been for a long time the central point in an extraordinarily narrow salient, surrounded by the enemy practically on three sides. It is truly an ancient storm centre, unsuccessfully besieged by the English in the fourteenth century, taken by them in the fifteenth (perhaps more by intrigue than by fighting), and held until Joan of Arc turned us out after nine years' occupation. It was entered by the Germans on the 4th of September, 1870, and again on the forty-fourth anniversary of that day in 1914. But while after 1870 they held the city for two years, in 1914 they had to evacuate it after nine days only. They commenced immediately to shell it, and, according to the universal opinion in France, to shell particularly the cathedral, in spite of official assurances that it was not used for observation purposes, which anyone but a Prussian would have believed. The north tower, unfortunately, was under repair in 1914, and covered with timber scaffolding. An incendiary shell set fire to this a week after the Germans had left the city, and the whole of the roof of the cathedral was burnt. Later on the vaulting over the transept and the choir was badly but not irreparably damaged (the statement is made that a number of Germans--the church being used as a hospital--were killed by a shell which penetrated the vaulting), and the chevet at the east end is very badly knocked about. The west end, happily, has not suffered so much, the direction of firing being generally from Brimont and Nogent l'Abesse, respectively north and east of the city. One is glad to know that it was found possible to save a certain amount of the fine stained glass.