No one can replace it.

Seven hundred years ago the secret of the glass died.

Diamonds can be bought anywhere, pearls can be matched, but not the stained glass of Rheims.

And under our feet, with straw and caked blood, it lay crushed into tiny fragments.
When you held a piece of it between your eye and the sun it glowed with a light that never was on land or sea.
War is only waste.

The German Emperor thinks it is thousands of men in flashing breastplates at manoeuvres, galloping past him, shouting "Hoch der Kaiser!" Until this year that is all of war he has ever seen.
I have seen a lot of it, and real war is his high-born officer with his eyes shot out, his peasant soldiers with their toes sticking stiffly through the straw, and the windows of Rheims, that for centuries with their beauty glorified the Lord, swept into a dust heap.
Outside the cathedral I found the bombardment of the city was still going forward and that the French batteries to the north and east were answering gun for gun.