"Nonsense," said an officer. "Who should be singing here?"
We circled the cathedral again, and saw what pavement-stones
can do against their own city, when the shell jerks them
upward. But there _was_ singing after all--on the other side
of a little door in the flank of the cathedral. We looked in,
doubting, and saw at least a hundred folk, mostly women, who
knelt before the altar of an unwrecked chapel. We withdrew
quietly from that holy ground, and it was not only the eyes of
the French officers that filled with tears. Then there came
an old, old thing with a prayer-book in her hand, pattering
across the square, evidently late for service.
"And who are those women?" I asked.
"Some are caretakers; people who have still little shops here.
(There is one quarter where you can buy things.) There are
many old people, too, who will not go away. They are of the
place, you see."
"And this bombardment happens often?" I said.
"It happens always. Would you like to look at the railway
station? Of course, it has not been so bombarded as the
cathedral."
We went through the gross nakedness of streets without people,
till we reached the railway station, which was very fairly
knocked about, but, as my friends said, nothing like as much
as the cathedral. Then we had to cross the end of a long
street down which the Boche could see clearly. As one glanced
up it, one perceived how the weeds, to whom men's war is the
truce of God, had come back and were well established the
whole length of it, watched by the long perspective of open,
empty windows.