In one group of ruined cellars that was once a splendid French city,
there is a beautiful building standing. It is rich with the art and
architecture of the sixteenth century. The lines are most graceful and
the structure is the fulfillment of Keats' line: "A thing of beauty is a
joy forever." Such a building belongs not to the French nation, but to
the whole human race. An architect like the man who planned this noble
building is born only once in a thousand years. Every visitor to that
ruined town asks himself this question: "Why did the Germans allow this
building to remain?" An incident of the story of Bapaume throws a flood
of light upon the problem.
One year ago, when the Germans were retreating from Bapaume, they looted
every house, burned or dynamited every building save the Hotel de Ville.
That city hall the Germans left standing in all its majesty and beauty.
In front of the building they placed a placard containing in substance
the statement that they left this building as a monument to Germany's
love of art and architecture.
Secretly, however, in the cellar of this noble building the Germans
buried several tons of dynamite. To this dynamite they attached a
seven-day clock. They set the seven-day clock to explode at eleven
o'clock one week after the Germans had retreated. These beasts worked
out the theory that the largest possible number of British and French
officers and public men would be inspecting the building at that hour of
the day.
The plot was successful. Their devilish cunning was rewarded and their
hate glutted. The clock struck the detonator, the dynamite exploded,
blew the building and the visitors into atoms. Standing in the ruined
public square, one sees nothing but that great shell pit where the earth
opened up its mouth and swallowed a monument builded to beauty and
grandeur. This other building, therefore, that stands in the city fifty
miles to the south of Bapaume is there for the sole reason that the
seven-day clock failed to explode the dynamite--not because of any love
of architecture that possessed the Germans. It is there to tell us that
some part of the mechanism of death failed to connect.
In analyzing the German mind nothing is more certain than the fact that
they lack a fine sense of humour and are often quite devoid of
imagination.
As for sculpture, nothing can be more hideous than the statues of the
fifteen Prussian kings that do not decorate, but simply vulgarize, the
avenue leading towards Magdeburg. The vast broad statue of Hindenburg,
to which the Germans come to drive nails and scratch their names in lead
pencils, reminds one of the occasional public buildings in this country
defaced by thoughtless and vulgar boys. Nor is there anything in the
world as ugly as the German sculptor's statue of the present Kaiser out
at Potsdam Palace, unless it be the statue of an Indian in front of a
tobacco store down in Smithville, Indian Territory, though even this is
doubtful. It hardly seems possible that one earth only 7,000 miles in
diameter could hold two statues as ugly as that of the Kaiser!
It is this singular lack of imagination and failure to understand the
beautiful that explains the systematic destruction by the German army of
the glorious cathedrals, the fourteenth century churches, libraries,
chateaux and hotels des villes that were the glory and beauty of France.
"If we cannot have these vineyards and orchards," said the Germans,
"Frenchmen shall not have them."
So they turned the land into a desert. Not otherwise the German seems to
feel that if he cannot build structures as beautiful as these glorious
buildings in France that he will not leave one of them standing.
Next to the Parthenon in Athens and St. Peter's in Rome, perhaps the
world's best loved and most admired building was the Cathedral of
Rheims. There Joan of Arc crowned Charles IX; there for centuries the
noblest men of France had gone to receive their offices and their
honours. A building that belonged to the world. What treasures of beauty
for the whole human race in the thousand and more statues in the
cathedral! How priceless the twelfth-century stained glass! What
paintings which have come down from the masters of Italy! Whoever
visited the library and the Cardinal's palace without exclaiming: "What
beautiful missals! What illuminated manuscripts?"
Fully conscious of the fact that they were impotent to produce such
treasures the Germans, unable to get closer to the cathedral than four
miles, determined to destroy them. Day after day they bombed the noble
cathedral. Gone now, too, the great stone roof! Fallen the flying
buttresses, ruined the chapels. Perished all the tapestries, the rugs
and the laces. Water stands in puddles on the floor. The cathedral is a
blackened shell.
The victim of grievous ingratitude, King Lear, was turned out into the
snow and hail by his wicked daughters; and the white-haired old king
wandered through the blackness of the night beneath the falling hail.
And, lo! the Cathedral of Rheims is a King Lear in architecture--broken,
wounded, exposed to the hails of the autumn and the snow of the winter,
through the coarseness and vandalism of the Germans.
The German Foreign Minister put it all in one word: "Let the neutrals
cease their everlasting chatter about the destruction of Rheims
Cathedral. All the paintings, statues and cathedrals in the world are
not so much as one straw to the Germans over against the gaining of our
goal and the conquest of their land."
Never was a truer word spoken. The German lacks the imagination and the
gift of the love of the beautiful. He would prefer one bologna sausage
factory and one brewery to the Parthenon, with St. Peter's and Rheims
Cathedral thrown in.