actual damage they have done has not been great. Mere riotous outbreaks, such as the No Popery Riots in London, or the Bristol Riots of the Reform time, have done more harm than all the bomb throwing from airships in this war so far. What makes them horrible and threatens to make them an instrument of degradation to all alike, is the disposition to kill for killing's sake, which must be shown in the use of them. A swift rush of aircraft dropping bombs will never force a fortified town to surrender, nor subdue a country. There is so great a difficulty in being sure of the bearings of such objects as fortifications, buildings for military purposes, railways etc., in misty weather or by night, that the aircraft can never rely on hitting them. The bombs thrown to fall on them strike the helpless non-combatants of both sexes and all ages in the great majority of cases. We know as much by experience, and the Germans know it as well as we. If then the airship is used, it must be with the knowledge that certain consequences will follow. The legitimate military mark will in all probability be missed, and the blow will fall on the unarmed, on women and on children. We must believe that the injury done to them is looked upon as a useful alternative or secondary object. The more enemies you kill the fewer will be left. Panic may be created-at any rate damage will be done, and that is an argument of barbarism, leading to acts of mere barbarity.

There are some who have convinced themselves that this war will end in the destruction of ' militarism.' Let us hope they are right. But the usual consequence of a great war has been to produce more militarism.' That this one will be an exception is a mere prophecy, and therefore cannot be confuted. The distinguished Spanish man of science, Señor Ramon y Cajal, when at last he was worried into giving his opinion as to the consequences of the present war, said that neither side would win so completely as to destroy the other, and that the losing party would set about imitating the winner in the hope of one day taking its revenge. So the world will be the worse for it all. He was accused of a 'desolating pessimism'; but imagining as one would, and believing what you wish to believe, are not the surest ways of reaching truth. When we next fight we shall but too probably start from a lower moral level.

DAVID HANNAY.

THE DESECRATION OF FRENCH MONUMENTS

I. Les Allemands destructeurs de Cathédrales et de Trésors du Passé. Paris: Hachette. 1915.

2. Journal d'un Rémois, du 3 Septembre au 6 Octobre 1914. Par HENRI JADART. Paris Collection du Tour de France.'

1915.

3. Les Villes Martyres de France et de Belgique. Par Marius Vachon. Paris: Payot. 1915.

T is well said, in the official report of the Sous-Secrétariat d'État des Beaux-Arts on the injuries done by the German invasion to the cities of France, that these cities have suffered 'in their flesh and in their spirit.' In other words, they have had to endure a double tribulation in the death, outrage, or other personal misery of their population, and in the destruction of those ancient buildings which were their heritage and their pride. All who are acquainted with French provincial life must be aware of the jealous enthusiasm with which the inhabitants of the principal country towns regard their local monuments. The municipal council may be as anti-clerical as it pleases; its individual members are no less p. ud of their cathedral than any abbé or archiprêtre could be. The spiritual life of the town revolves around the edifice which links it to a distant and glorious past, which encourages the combative pride of the population, and which even the peasants vaguely recognise as something dignified and of personal value to themselves.

In the present war there has been produced an element of destructive force which is, in its main essence, new to history, and which is excessively sinister. We are accustomed to that vague stupidity of destruction which is inevitably connected with the necessities of strategy. No general can endanger his safety or change his plan of attack because a beautiful building stands in the way. It is obvious that such æsthetic sensitiveness would be absurd and even blameworthy. Works of art must take their risk like human beings, if they have the misfortune to find themselves crushed in the embrace of conflicting armies. But in the campaigns of 1914-15 we find a new force

working in the ingenious brains of the German invaders. We find clear evidence of their determination, lucidly planned in advance, to destroy peaceful and beautiful towns which offered no resistance, simply because they were beautiful and were of the nature of spiritual assets to the opponent. The existence of this diabolical ingenuity of desecration has been very generally perceived in the case of Belgium, where the deliberate assassination of Louvain and Malines excited the horror of the whole civilised world. In France the same outrages have been perpetrated, but, with the exception of Reims, these seem as yet to have attracted less, or less definite, sympathy in England. Against these acts, whether in France or in Belgium, no protest has been raised either in Germany or Austro-Hungary. On the contrary the servile and pedantic art-critics of the Central Empires have gloried in the humiliation of the artistic wealth of their neighbours. They have displayed the savage insensitiveness of which Heine prophesied. It seems to be no more than just to insist that, while more harrowing and more imminently pathetic details of human suffering pour in upon us, we should yet not forget to execrate the results of the fury of the disciplined Teutonic hordes on the treasures of French art. It is to be remembered that in the case of a country so sensitive, so highly cultivated, so elegantly educated as France, the historical monuments take a leading part in sustaining the national independence. They foster that due pride and resolution which support the national grandeur. It was with the definite intention of humbling their enemy in his tenderest susceptibilities that the Germans, armed by all the ingenuity of their science, coldly executed the destruction of Louvain and of Reims. It is impossible that the world of art can ever forget the crimes committed against it by these professorial vandals, and we think it well to put on record, as plainly as the shifting history of the passing hour will permit, the actual facts with regard to the desecration of French monuments. We have striven to exaggerate nothing, but to disengage from the often vague and always distracted testimony of survivors what is approximately the real state of affairs.

The crime committed against the incomparable Cathedral of Reims has awakened throughout the world an indignation only equalled and scarcely surpassed by the horrors of Louvain. It is noticeable that there was a difference of attitude in the

two cases. At Louvain, amid the appearance of unbridled frenzy, a perfectly cool calculation spared the one central building which might be a future asset to a victorious Germany. At Reims a parallel calculation was concentrated on the humiliation of France by the desecration of that 'Bible in stone' which was the peculiar glory and joy of every thoughtful Frenchman. To German kultur, Louvain might yet be something, Reims must ever be nothing, and on the German system of complete contempt for all things not Teutonic, to smash and burn the cradle of French patriotic sentiment was an amusing as well as a laudable feat. With the horrible erudition which makes their barbarity the more sickening, the Germans were well acquainted with the value, the beauty, the singularity of the great royal treasure-house at Reims. It was knowing all this, and armed with tiresome disquisitions and monographs, that they quietly resolved on a complete devastation of the Cathedral. The conversation of the Saxon commander with the Mayor of Reims is preserved, and is an appalling record of callous pedantry.

The national sentiment about Reims, as the cradle of French sovereignty, was first recognised, or rather was revived, ninety years ago when the government decided on the coronation there of Charles X. An alternative proposal had been that the ceremony should take place at St. Denis, and if this had prevailed it is probable that Reims would have remained no more sacred than other French cathedrals. We gather that its artistic value had been greatly neglected since the occupation of the city by the Allies in 1814, when much damage, not of a structural kind, was done to several of the noble churches of Reims. As soon as the coronation was decided upon, a work of restoration was begun in feverish haste, with the result that by May 1825 the Cathedral became much what it remained until the Commission of 1875 worked the will of Viollet-le-Duc upon it. The young Victor Hugo attended the ceremony, fired with enthusiasm for the essentially Gothic style of the church. In a letter to his wife (May 28, 1825) he wrote:

'Charles and I spent a quarter of an hour gazing at the arch of a single doorway; we should need a year to see and to admire the whole. The interior, as they have arranged it, is much less beautiful than it was in its ancient nudity. They have painted the old granite blue, and have loaded the austere sculpture with gold-leaf

and tinsel. However, they have not repeated the mistake they made at St. Denis, the ornaments are gothic like the cathedral, and everything, except the throne, which is of the Corinthian order (how absurd!) is in good taste. The general effect is pleasing to the eye, and the more one reflects on the proportions of the structure, the more one sees that the best possible has been done. As it is, this decoration shows the progress of romantic ideas; six months ago they would have turned the old church of the Franks into a Greek temple.'

The sentiment of a whole nation for the miraculous building, the Rose of the Kings of France, has been steadily growing during these ninety years, and it is not surprising that the outrages of September 1914 have awakened a greater rage and disgust than almost any other act of the invader. These feelings have found expression in a multitude of forms-in the poetry of M. Paul Fort, from which we quoted in our last number; in the prose of M. Pierre Loti's 'La Basilique-Fantôme'; in the exhibition of innumerable paintings and photographs of the fane as it stood before last year and of its present lamentable and mutilated state. For this reason, we shall dwell less on the actual detail of damage done to the Cathedral than it would otherwise be needful to do, but rather concentrate our attention on matters of less importance which have been more neglected. In particular it is well to record briefly the exact history of the devastation.

It was on the 4th of September that the huge advancing wave of German invasion, making straight for Paris from Charleroi and Mézières, broke on the light hills of the Haute Champagne and paused in the Rémois. From an eminence outside they playfully threw a few bombs at the Cathedral, and smashed a little old glass. Then they occupied Reims, professing great veneration for the antiquities of the city, and they placed their own wounded in the nave of Notre Dame, as a special sign of the immunity of the Church itself. They stayed in Reims eight days, doing no particular harm, but on the 12th, when they evacuated the city, the bewildered inhabitants saw the soldiers heap up great masses of straw within the Cathedral. The Germans pretended that this straw was to form beds for the wounded, but at the same moment all the wounded were removed, and the straw left. Already a sinister suspicion was awakened in the minds of some of the inhabitants. The attitude of the invaders had