boards, within which its holy dust has formed heaps: fragments of rose-windows, broken piles of stained glass, heads of angels, the joined hands of saints. From the top of the tower to the base, the charred stone has taken on a strange color of cooked flesh, and the holy personages, still upright in rows on the cornices, have been peeled, as it were, by the fire; they no longer have faces or fingers, and, with their human forms, which still persist, they look like the dead drawn up in files, their contours vaguely indicated under a sort of reddish grave-clothes.

We make the circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the barrier which isolates the fragile and still admirable phantom is everywhere solidly closed. As for the old palace adjoining the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France came to rest on the day of their consecration, it is no longer anything more than a ruin, without windows or roof, everywhere licked and blackened by the flame.

What a peerless jewel it was, this cathedral, still more beautiful than Notre Dame in Paris. More open and lighter, more slender also, with its columns like long reeds, wonderful to be so fragile, and yet to hold firm; a wonder of our French religious art, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had caused to blossom there in its mystic purity, before they came to us from Italy, to materialize and spoil everything, the sensual heaviness of what we have agreed to call the Renais

Oh! the coarse and cowardly and imbecile brutality of those bundles of iron, launched in full flight against the lacework, so delicate, that had risen confidently in the air for centuries, and which so many battles, invasions, scourges have never dared to touch! . . .

That great closed house, there, on the square, must be the Archbishop's residence. I try ringing the bell at the entrance to ask the favor of admission to the cathedral. His Eminence," I am told, "is at mass, but will soon return." If I am willing to wait . . . And, while I wait, the priest who receives me re

lates to me the burning of the episcopal palace: "Beforehand, they had sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical substance; when they then threw their incendiary bombs, the timbers burned like straw, and you saw everywhere jets of green flame, which spread with the noise of fireworks."

In fact, the barbarians had premeditated this sacrilege, and prepared it long ago; in spite of their foolishly absurd pretexts, in spite of their shameless denials, what they wished to destroy here was the very heart of old France; some superstitious fancy drove them to it, as much as their instinct of savages, and this is the task they plunged into desperately, when nothing else in the city, or almost nothing, suffered.

"Could not an effort be made," I said, "to replace the burned roof of the cathedral?-to cover the vaulted roofs again as quickly as possible? For without this they cannot resist the coming winter."

"Evidently," he said, "at the first snows, at the first rains, there is a risk that everything will fall, the more so, as those charred stones have lost their power of resistance. But we cannot even try that, to preserve them a little, for the Germans never take their eyes off us; at the end of their field-glasses, it is the cathedral, always the cathedral; and as soon as a man ventures to appear on a turret, in a tower, the rain of shells immediately begins again. No, there is nothing to be done. It is in the hands of God."

Returning, the prelate graciously gives me a guide, who has the keys of the barrier, and at last I penetrate into the ruins of the cathedral, into the denuded nave, which thus appears still higher and more immense. It is cold there; it is sad enough to make one weep. This unexpected cold, this cold. much keener than outside, is, perhaps, what from the first takes hold of you, disconcerts you; instead of the slightly heavy odor which generally fills ancient churches-the vapor of so much incense that has been burned there, the emanations of so many coffins that have been blessed there, of so many generations of

men that have crowded there, for agony and prayer-instead of this, a damp and icy wind, which enters rustling through all the crevices of the walls, through the breaches in the stained glass windows and the holes in the vaulted ceilings. Those vaulted roofs, up there, here and there smashed by grapeshot-one's eyes are immediately lifted up by instinct to look at them, one's eyes are, as it were, drawn to them by the up-springing of all these columns, as slender as reeds, which rise in sheaves to sustain them; they have retreating curves of exquisite grace, which seem to have been imagined, so as not to allow the glances sent heavenward to fall back again. One never grows weary of bending one's head back in order to see them, to see the sacred roofs which are about to fall into nothingness; and they are up there also, far up, the long series of almost aërial pointed arches, on which they are supported, pointed arches indefinitely alike from one end of the nave to the other, and which, in spite of their complicated carvings, are restful to follow in their retreating perspective, so harmonious are they.

And it is better to go forward beneath them with raised head, not too carefully looking where one walks, for this pavement, rather sadly sonorous, has recently been soiled and blackened by the charring of human flesh. It is known that, on the day of the fire, the cathedral was full of German wounded, stretched on straw beds which caught fire, and it became a scene of horror worthy of a dream of Dante; all these creatures, whose raw wounds were baked in the flames, dragging themselves, screaming, on their red stumps, to try to reach the narrow doors. One knows also the heroism of the ambulance bearers, priests and nuns, risking their lives in the midst of the bombs, to try to save these hapless brutes, whom their own brother Germans had not even thought of sparing; however, they did not succeed in saving them all; some remained, and were burned to death in the nave, leaving foul clots on the sacred flagstones, where of old processions of kings and queens slowly dragged

their ermine mantles, to the music of the great organ and the Gregorian chants. .

"Look! says my guide to me, showing me a large hole in one of the aisles, "that is the work of a shell which they fired at us yesterday evening; then come and see a miracle." And he leads me into the choir, where the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, preserved, one would say, by some special grace, is still there, intact, with eyes of gentle ecstasy.

The most irreparable loss is that of the great stained glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century so religiously composed, in meditation and dream, gathering the saints by hundreds, with their translucent draperies, their luminous halos. There also German scrap-iron rushed in great stupid bundles, crushing everything. The masterpieces, which no one will ever reproduce, have scattered their fragments on the flagstones, forever impossible to separate, the golds, the reds, the blues, whose secret is lost. Ended, the rainbow transparencies, ended, the graceful, naïve attitudes of all these holy people, with their pale little ecstatic faces; the thousands of precious fragments of these stained glass windows which, in the course of centuries, had little by little become iris-tinted like opals, are lying on the ground-where they still shine like jewels. . . .

A whole splendid cycle of our history, which seemed to go on living in this sanctuary, with a life almost terrestrial, though immaterial, has just been plunged suddenly into the abyss of things that are ended, whose very memory will soon perish. The Great Barbarity has passed by, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the ancient, because it is stupidly and outrageously self-satisfied, and, in consequence, fundamental, incurable, final-destined, if it be not crushed, to throw a sinister night of eclipse over the world. . . .

Verily, this Jeanne d'Arc in the choir has very strangely remained, untouched, immaculate, in the midst of the disorder, with not even the slightest scratch on her dress. . .

I

SHOULD like to have seen how the troops of India stood the raw autumn in Artois and Flanders. But the Indian prisoners at Lille were transferred to the East in order to make room for fresh contingents. I, myself, have experienced the difficulty of transplanting Indians to a colder climate. On my last journey to Tibet I had two Radschputs from Cashmere with me. When we got into the mountains they nearly froze to death, and my caravan leader, Muhamed Isa, declared they would be about as useful as puppies. I had to send them back. The same thing happened to me with my Indian cook; outside India he was absolutely useless. In Tibet they live on meat, in India on vegetables. How could he stand so sudden a change of both climate and diet!

Now the press has been claiming that the English have ordered a full contingent from India to Europe. I found it hard to believe but at the front I learned that it was true. "How do you treat the Indian soldiers?" I once asked a couple of officers. "We just arrest them," answered one, and the other added: "We don't need to do even that; they will soon die in the trenches."

When I admit that I myself made a stupid blunder in thinking that Indians could do service in Tibet, I am justified in claiming that Lord Charles Beresford made ten times as stupid a blunder when he expressed the hope of seeing "Indian lances roaming the streets of Berlin and the little brown Gurkas making themselves comfortable in the park of Sans Souci."

But the import of Indian troops is more than a stupid blunder-it is a crime!

For almost a century and a half Great Britain has performed the shining mission of acting as India's guardian; no other people probably could successfully carry through so gigantic a task. Indian troops have fought with honor against ther neighbors, and, moreover have assisted in maintaining order among the 300 millions of their people.

But never has it occurred to an English government as now to the Liberal government, to oppose black infidels to Christian Europeans! That is a crime against culture, against civilization and against Christianity. And if the English missionaries approve it, then are they hypocrites and false bearers of the Gospel.

India's English rulers despise-and rightfully—all marital relations between whites and Hindoos; the children of such marriages are regarded as mules, and are often called such; they are neither horse nor ass, they are half caste. In Calcutta they have their own quarter and are allowed to live in no other part of the city. But-when it comes to the question of overthrowing the "German barbarians," then an alliance with the bronze-skinned people is good. enough for England!

Is it one of the twentieth century's worthy advances in culture and civilization that the unsuspecting Indian is brought hundreds of miles over land and sea that he may on the battlefields of Europe drive to destruction the first soldiers of the world, the German army? Even though some may answer

this question in the affirmative, I hold unshaken to my assertion that such a course of action is the very height of frightfulness! Not frightful to the German soldiers, for I know what sort of feeling the Indian fighters have for them-respect and sympathy!

And we aren't much nearer that "roaming about in the streets of Berlin," and the lindens of Sans Souci are not yet waving above the warriors from the slopes of the Himalayas.

What must these Indian troops think of their white masters! That the future will show. Whoever has seen something of the land of a thousand legends, who has ridden over the crests of the Himalayas, who has dreamed in the moonlight before the Taj Mahal, who has seen the holy Ganges slip gray and soft past the wharves of Benares, who has been entranced by the train of elephants under the mango trees of Dekkan-in short, whoever has loved India and admired the order and security which prevails there under the English rule, he will need no very powerful imagination to understand with what thoughts the Indian soldiers will go back, and with what feelings their families and their fellow countrymen in the little narrow huts on the slopes of the Himalayas will listen to their accounts. Only with a shudder can we think of this, for it must be said that here a crime against civilization and Christianity has been done in the name of civilization.

The question cannot be suppressed: Will the Indian contingent really be used? Will not the white millions of Great Britain, Canada and Australia suffice, to say nothing of the French, Belgians, Russians, Serbians, Montenegrins and Japanese? Apparently not. In The Times of September 5th appears in large letters: The need for more men. Already they are in need of more people to overthrow the Kultur of the "German barbarians"! The English people must be educated by a special method in order to understand both the cause and the aim of this war. Otherwise the Englishman will stay at home and play football and cricket.

And what is this education of the people? In regard to this the English press informs us daily. It is a systematic lie! The fatal reality, that England is slowly sliding to catastrophe, must be hidden by a strict censorship. The English people has no suspicion of Hindenburg's victories. The development of the German operations in Poland is translated into a victorious move of the Russians on Berlin! The most shameful slander concerning the Kaiser is spread abroad! The Germans are barbarians who must be annihilated, and the civilized peoples of Servia, Senegambia and Portugal must take part in this praiseworthy undertaking!

England carries on this war with a perversion of the truth, and truth is as rare in the English press as lies in the German.

But do the people really believe what they read in the English newspapers? Yes, blindly! I have been convinced of this by letters received from England. An appeal signed by many scholarsamong them several Nobel prize winners-and sent to me, closes with the words:

The old story of the splinter and the beam! Is England's rule of the sea no military system then? Can there be conceived a more far-reaching militarism than that which stretches out its conquests over five continents? Which even clutches at the straw which republican Portugal holds out and announces "the need for more men" in the newspapers?

What was the Boer War then? An expression perhaps of this same humane solicitude for the small states which now causes England to break the lance for Belgium's independence?