The "pity of it!" and at the same time, the tenacious undying life of France--all the long past behind her, the unconquerable future before her--these are the ideas one carries away from Rheims, hot in the heart.

Above all, for the moment, the pity of it--the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly _nos mines_--symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral.
And as we passed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France, which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and village and country houses, and is now but little different from Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a passionate anxiety, almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure.
"France is right--is _right_," I caught myself saying for the hundredth time.

"Before anything else--justice to her!--protection and healing for her! Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and trampled on her, 'like a wild beast out of the wood,' and healing for wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed for himself the state of her richest provinces.

It was she who offered her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured most and bled most, heavily as others--Britain, Italy, Belgium, Serbia--have endured.

Her claim must come first--and let those in England and America who wish to realise why _come and see_." We drove down diagonally through the Marne salient as it was last summer after the German break-through on the Marne, to Dormans and so across the river.