The blazing doors had turned the straw on which they lay into a prairie fire.
Splashed by the molten lead and threatened by falling timbers, the priests, at the risk of their lives and limbs, carried out the wounded Germans, sixty in all.
But, after bearing them to safety, their charges were confronted with a new danger.

Inflamed by the sight of their own dead, four hundred citizens having been killed by the bombardment, and by the loss of their cathedral, the people of Rheims who were gathered about the burning building called for the lives of the German prisoners.

"They are barbarians," they cried.

"Kill them!" Archbishop Landreaux and Abbe Chinot placed themselves in front of the wounded.
"Before you kill them," they cried, "you must first kill us." This is not highly colored fiction, but fact.

It is more than fact.