ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1914, AFTER HE HAD FINISHED HIS MONTHLY FIRST Friday Mass at the cathedral, Monseigneur Maurice Landrieux—archpriest of Reims for the previous two years and a cardinal for twenty-five before that—was walking near the cathedral. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a round face with a large forehead and dark hair, and his generous smile revealed strength and invited confidence. Most Reims citizens were outdoors that morning, because the fighting had ceased—for the moment. Landrieux would have seen and greeted locals—a shopkeeper minding his store, a nun heading to her convent, a civil servant nearing city hall, a child holding her mother’s hand.
This was barely twenty days since the German armies had thrust into France at the start of World War I, and the French, in retreat, had declared their northeastern city of Reims an open city. Its hundred thousand residents expected the invading Germans to simply march in to occupy the city, and this had come to pass: an advance German Saxon Guard unit had arrived at Reims’s gates and taken city hall for the night, while French forces had continued their retreat southwest of the city. The Germans’ next moves, however, were not what the citizenry expected.
Normally Landrieux’s walk around town helped him maintain pastoral contact with the citizens, but now it served a more complex purpose: to observe the Germans and assess their intentions. The city’s crown jewel was its cathedral, the largest in France, which could seat three thousand for Mass, with another thousand standing. Germans entering the city were assembling around the cathedral and the nearby city hall to collect orders from commanders. A line of German cars and caissons clamored into the cobblestone courtyards and plazas, followed by horsemen, infantry, and artillery. The masses of men and equipment rattled, screeched, and yelled, but their ruckus was generally peaceful. The prevailing concerns of the townspeople, Landrieux knew, were how soon and how adamantly German command would force the people to accept officers for billeting in their homes and how severe the German requisitions would be for food and supplies.
Landrieux heard a strange detonation. Then he heard a second and a third. At first, he was not greatly concerned about the explosion, thinking the Germans were blowing up bridges or celebrating the anniversary of their victory in the last war. But as he walked a few blocks east of the cathedral, the distant whistling sounds and booming in the air startled him when a shell splinter fell at his feet. He knew then what it meant: the Germans were bombarding the city.
He headed back to the cathedral. On the way, ten shells whistled over his head. He arrived to see the west side of the cathedral covered in a cloud of smoke and dust and could barely make out the outline of the Palace of Justice adjacent to the cathedral on the north side. Explosions continued near the cathedral’s entrance and surrounding houses. Stone trim under a cathedral porch fell from the coping. He circled the cathedral, finding his assistant, Abbé Andrieux, with a church employee, Mr. Huilleret, taking refuge in the clock tower staircase.
Mr. Rouné, a civil defenseman, ran up to the cathedral, carrying from city hall a bed sheet nailed to a Turk’s head broom. He and Andrieux climbed the cathedral’s north tower, raised the top stairway door off its axis to get to the top, and flaunted the sheet as a flag in the brisk wind. But the cannonade stormed on. Dust rose to the roof. They heard the echoes of glass from the cathedral’s windows crashing onto the floors of the naves. Jets of smoke and dust in the town marked places hit by shells, including several houses. Fires broke out in the surrounding quarter.
It was not only Landrieux and his fellow citizens of Reims who were astonished by the bombardment. Two German officers couldn’t believe they were being bombarded by their own guns. So they sent a car with two German soldiers and a city employee in the direction of the firing to get it to stop. Those soldiers found that batteries of a different German unit—the Imperial German Army, Prussian guards—not the Saxon Guard, were firing from Les Mesneux, more than four miles southwest of Reims. The Prussians claimed that they hadn’t known the Saxon Guard was in the city and that the shelling was a mistake.
By 10:30 that morning, another churchman joined Landrieux to inspect for damage. He was forty-year-old Abbé Rémi Thinot, master of the chapel. The cathedral seemed to tremble, and its structure magnified the intensity of the explosion like the shell of a mammoth bass viol. They found no points of explosion inside but did locate damage to cathedral sculptures outside. A shell had hit the street on the north side, gouging a ditch that had filled with water by the time they’d reached it. Landrieux dipped his hand in the water to find it still warm from hot metal fragments. Splinters had splashed across the high arches of the buttresses. A shell had hit the cathedral at the north crossbar of the transept and dislodged large masonry. In the clock tower staircase, a violent gust of air pushed Abbé Andrieux and his companions to their knees.
Even if the Germans had tried to miss the cathedral on September 4, their intention changed within a week. The next day, the Germans requisitioned from the town tons of meat, vegetables, bread, oats, petrol, straw, and hay. German soldiers bivouacked all over the city, including in front of the cathedral, surrounding its bronze statue of Joan of Arc, on her horse, holding her bent sword high. Soldiers and horse-drawn carts squatted in the square, horses whinnied and clopped, farriers’ hammers clanked, and everything smelled of horse manure, petrol, and grease. In this scene, the chortling German soldiers surrounded fires and gobbled sausages, black bread, and wine.
Abbé Landrieux and his fellow priests felt hurt to see their Joan of Arc standing there lonely, lost in the middle of the German bivouac, surrounded by Prussians, as if she were their prisoner. German commands spread around the city to force—under threat—the billeting of German officers in commandeered homes, where they appropriated families’ food, water, and wine and displaced them from their beds.
A week later, Landrieux learned that the Germans would be putting all their wounded into the cathedral. He went to headquarters to ask for reconsideration. Weren’t there other places for better quartering where the wounded German soldiers could be assisted? But on arrival he sensed quickly that there was electricity in the air. German senior officers were distracted and edgy, flustered, talking abruptly. Soldiers with fixed bayonets scurried about and fenced in automobiles that brought to the German commander the mayor, the secretary-general of the city, the deputy mayor, and the president of the chamber of commerce. The Germans were assembling one hundred French hostages. By order of the German commander in chief, the mayor posted his proclamation that the hostages would be hung and that the town would be burned, partially or totally, and its inhabitants hung on any attempt at disorder. To choose the hostages, the Germans ordered the city leaders to present themselves and name other prominent citizens.
That evening, word circulated of signs that the Germans were ordering their men to evacuate the town, with fighting in progress around Reims. Late in the day, workers, under German orders, brought fifteen thousand bundles of straw into the cathedral to cover the floors in the three naves. The clatter of workers and soldiers removing hundreds of wooden chairs, and piling them in heaps in the choir and sanctuary, resounded through the great space. But that evening, before the Saxons could put their wounded in the cathedral, all German soldiers evacuated the town. The French Army had arrived eighteen miles west of Reims while convoys of Germans filled the road southwest to Vitry-sur-Seine, drawing the French hostages with them.
A citizen the next day brought a large Red Cross flag to the cathedral’s north tower and hoisted it next to the white flag the Germans had left. When the French troops entered the city, they replaced the white flag with a French Tricolor. And the Red Cross flag, although in shreds, remained and was soon replaced with a larger one that had been pieced together by locals from a clergyman’s vestment and a rose cassock. But it also was quickly ruined by the wind.
Landrieux tried, starting on the fifteenth, to get the straw removed from the cathedral. The work finally began the next day, but the French military quickly issued an order to stop. French commanders had heard a report that a German senior officer had let slip a comment “expressing pity for the coming disaster.” From that, the French commanders suspected the Germans of planning some new attack and determined, as a deterrent, to add more German prisoners to the wounded Germans who were already in the cathedral.
The next afternoon, French military moved a dozen wounded Germans from the hospital into the cathedral on stretchers and open carriages, followed by more of the same the next day. The military carried out those transfers very conspicuously, in Landrieux’s view, to be sure the Germans’ spies—who lurked in Reims—would see the movements, in the hope that they would report to German command and deter any plans to create a “disaster.”
There were no doctors available in the cathedral for patients—only a chaplain, a deaconess, and a couple of nuns. More than a hundred wounded men lay on the floor of the nave with only blankets, accompanied by a German major, himself bandaged, wounded in the head. French soldiers guarded the doors.
On the eighteenth, with Mass under way, a shell crashed through a window of the archbishop’s palace adjoining the cathedral, penetrating interior stone, killing three men, and wounding fifteen. Repeated explosions hit the roofs and buttresses. Landrieux saw the wounded men lying in the cathedral panicking, believing themselves lost, mad with fright, not knowing where to find cover. Those who could not move groaned, begged, and cried.
Landrieux arranged for the wounded to be bundled into the clock tower staircase, which seemed to him safest in view of the direction of the firing. Those who could move, moved together. The others drew themselves to the staircase, bucking and jerking, hauling on all fours, wound coverings as their boots. Those whose legs had been amputated, shifted ahead with their stumps. The priests helped the disabled, dragging those unable to move by themselves, and though the wounded were barely clothed, the priests sat them down on the naked stone stairs. Five German officers among the wounded called out that they were under no illusion: they were convinced that fellow German units were aiming at the cathedral. Landrieux and his helpers had to repeat the process of moving the wounded a second time that evening and again the next morning.
Most shells fell in the neighborhood of city hall and the military barracks. Others fell throughout the town. Three struck the cathedral.
Landrieux had just left the cathedral by foot to visit the stricken hospital when a shell fell behind him. He retraced his steps in the smoke and found a man bleeding, stretched out on the steps, gashed in the stomach. Soldiers carried the man into the church, where the wounded German major could assess his injuries. By evening, the wounded man was taken to the hospital, nearly dead. Some wounded had been reinjured by falling stones or by pieces of lead severed from windows. Their heads bled. Landrieux and Abbé Schemberg gave last rights to those who were Catholic. A wave of sunshine through the windows lit the carnage and suffering. The wounded lay on piles of straw, in all stages of suffering. Their bluish-gray uniforms contrasted with the black of the attending priests’ robes. In the background on the steps outside, French soldiers in their red uniform trousers stood by.
The wounded German major begged Landrieux to send an emissary to the German front to tell them they were shooting at their own soldiers. But the major acknowledged that they probably already knew it and that it was the cathedral they were trying to hit, even at the cost of killing their own soldiers. How could this be a strategy? Wasn’t it unthinkable for civilized commanders to order such a thing?
When explosions hit, the cathedral’s pillars quavered. Landrieux and his colleagues heard the thunderbolt and thud of jolts pummeling the naves, the blows absorbed by the resilience of the arches’ vaults. At one point, the noise of falling stones thundered so loudly that Landrieux and his companions thought the apse was collapsing. He ran outside to see. A flying buttress of the first retaining wall had broken and fallen through the roof of the lady chapel, its remaining lower section pointing toward the sky. Stone chunks littered next to a crack in the roof, exposing timbers, broken masonry still moving through. The remaining rubble perched nearby, threatening further collapse.
During Mass on the next morning, the nineteenth, the bombardment began again. Landrieux told the altar boy assisting him, “Leave me. Go. Get into shelter.” But the boy said, “I would rather remain,” and stayed until the conclusion. The bombardment lasted throughout the day. During a lull, some of the staff ran across the plaza to the archbishop’s palace to get bread for the wounded, who were moved again to the tower. At two o’clock, Landrieux and the other priests entered the chapel to pray. The a cappella lament of their chants conjured withdrawal, sadness, and serenity as backdrop to the brutal clash and concussions of the attack’s striking shells.
That’s when the fire started. At about three o’clock word spread that smoke was coming from the scaffolding of the north tower. They rushed outside to see. Landrieux and Abbé Thinot huddled outside the west portal, searching to spot whether an incendiary shell had hit. To Landrieux, there was no doubt: Massive scaffolding of heavy lumber—which had been in place for a year of repairs, covering the north half of the west facade—had now been hit. The shell had lashed through the wooden scaffolding half way up the north tower, erupting in a flash fire. The two men ran down the steps, flinching, and were cowering away from the portal when the cathedral’s forty-foot round stained-glass rose window burst from the fire’s heat, showering sparks into the cathedral’s interior.
With that, the straw beds ignited. Fires flared in the wooden roof. Lead sheets that covered the roof’s oak frame boiled, scattering a fine rain of molten lead inside the cathedral. On the exterior, streams of the molten lead ran under vaults and out the mouths of stone gargoyles that had overseen the church for centuries. Firefighters struggled in vain to contain the fires. The nearest fire station—now empty—had been destroyed by bombing, its firemen struggling to deal with other fires in the Wool Quarter of town. Overwhelmed rescue services anguished over their incapacity to help.
Water pipes burst. Winds drove the flames up the staircase of the north tower, whose draft fanned the inferno surrounding the scaffolding as the fire consumed the carpentry of the cathedral’s superstructure and destroyed the archbishop’s palace. The combustibles that had been left throughout the cathedral, including the straw in the nave and chairs in the choir, fueled the flames. All ignited, including the wood columns that framed the main door.
Landrieux and Thinot, hoping they could help, tried to climb the scaffold. Above them, four cylindrical fires swirled, blazing one above another in stages. The two abbés tried with their arms to dismember the dense girders but could not, their calls for help drowned out by the roar of shell explosions convulsing the town.
The two men retreated, in the hope that the wooden scaffolding not supporting the building would burn, fall away, and leave the building standing. They tried, with the help of prisoners, to gather and cast the straw out clear of the building into the terrace. But outside, the fire was intensifying and eventually reached the facade. As they felt the fire approach, red tints appeared in the light, as if permeated with blood, which flushed the windows at the entrance. And with a loud cracking report, the scaffolding broke and crashed to the surface of the Place du Parvis plaza in front of the west facade.
Landrieux and the other priests collected the wounded beneath the organ and also in the apse. Those who could, dragged themselves. Others, who were ill or missing limbs, were hauled on stretchers.
The flames devoured the apse, scaled up the steeple, and spread over the roofs. The flames’ tentacles stroked the lead plates of the roof as if with hot tongues, melting the scales away, little by little, and revealed the raw enormous cluster of woodwork whose frame stood out, across the entwined arcades above the vaults, like a colossal bony structure of fire. Streamlets of lead ran in the grooves as through conduits and discharged through the gargoyles, dribbling down as if tears and then spreading on the floors and flying back in granular fragments as dust, with fiery particles passing through the air encircling in the airborne soot.
When the priests realized that the woodwork of the roof was aflame and would be lost, they turned to save the pieces of the Sacrament at the altar and then the gold and silver altarpieces, and other medieval relics stored in the sacristy as the cathedral’s treasure. Landrieux and Thinot, joined by Abbé Andrieux and one Mr. Divoir, forced open the doors of the cupboards and ran outside to find hands to help. Several workmen responded, helping to move the treasure. The molten lead splashed and mixed with sparks flying all around, in the smoke, lit by the flames. The sparks pricked on their faces and hands as the priests and helpers traversed the courtyard carrying their pieces of treasure.
All told, the time that passed between the priests’ ascent into the scaffolding and the moment when the fire died out was about an hour. The cathedral burned at both ends, though the middle was still intact. Landrieux eventually concluded that it wasn’t the scaffolding that had set fire to the roofs: it was a shell falling on the apse and then two other shells hitting the roof of the central nave. Four distinct fires had consumed the cathedral.
And if the fire had not been catastrophe enough, after carrying the treasures, Abbé Landrieux saw a small group of French soldiers in their red uniform trousers lined up, kneeling, their rifles raised, facing the cathedral entrance. At first, he didn’t realize what was happening. But when the door opened, he saw the wounded assembled in the lobby, not being allowed to come out, as the fire roared behind them. They stood frozen, staring into the rifles.
Landrieux confronted the sergeant, yelling, “Wretched man, what are you going to do?”
“We have our orders.”
“It is impossible,” Landrieux said. “There is a mistake. What has now occurred was not foreseen. They must come out. You will not fire upon unarmed wounded men, even if they are Germans! On the battlefield it is war, but here it would be a crime.”
“We are obliged to do it. Those are our orders.”
So Landrieux placed himself in front of the door and yelled, “Very well; you will commence with me!”
After a pause—as an opening—Landrieux assured the French soldiers that none of the German prisoners would try to escape; he and the other priests would escort the wounded to city hall and hand them over to the military. The prisoners, through an interpreter, agreed and followed in a procession, those who needed supports using brooms, sticks, and boards as crutches, others being carried on stretchers.
The wounded prisoners and priests confronted a hostile crowd of townspeople, who surged forward, bringing the procession to a standstill. Fearing the crowd and seeing a French military captain with a squad riding by, Landrieux called to the captain to intervene. The captain warned Landrieux that the crowd, growing in anger, would never let the wounded prisoners and priests reach city hall and that the abbé, therefore, should give up his futile quest. Landrieux and his flock pressed forward, hesitated, resumed, and then halted. Crucial minutes passed, the two groups at an impasse.
The captain spotted a nearby factory. He ordered his squad to use their mounts to separate the crowd and Landrieux’s column, forcing all parties to freeze in place. The captain ran to the factory, appealed to its proprietor to open his manufactory doors, and, having been satisfactorily persuasive, before his horsemen had to resort to force, shuffled the German prisoners to safety. On the night of the nineteenth and twentieth, stretcher-bearers and soldiers transferred the 124 wounded to ambulances for evacuation by rail to a safe zone.
Despite the menace of that mob, most of the townspeople of Reims had made no trouble: they either had run to escape the German approach on the city or had been hiding in their homes.
That evening a French pilot, a Commandant Capitrel, flew over Reims while returning to his base and reported seeing the burning glow of the cathedral: It was a silent, glowing furnace, without flames or smoke. Its contours, outlined by the cathedral’s nave and the transept, stretched over the city as though a giant blazing cross—the Cross of the Redemption. It was as if disaster had stretched out beneath the heavens and forged itself into a symbol of hope.
The giant cross formed by the cathedral fire had awakened the world to the new dangers posed by modern warfare and eventually—but only after subsequent disasters—played a part in stirring to action the government powers charged with protecting historic monuments in France.
Cathedrals are, in Malcolm Miller’s words, “embassies,” noting that in medieval times bishops were thought of as “celestial ambassadors.” Churches are vehicles of culture and evangelization. Each such building, for its congregants, is the locus of intimate remembrances. France’s great cathedrals have served as venues, pantheons for national solemnities, for coronations and royal marriages and burials, and many cathedrals—such as Notre-Dame de Reims, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame de Paris, and Notre-Dame de Chartres—have been assets of economic necessity, in need of civil defense.
Before 1914, it had been unthinkable that any army would intentionally target a cathedral, let alone one of France’s great cathedrals like Reims. And yet Reims Cathedral was hit by seventeen shells in the weeks following that first bombardment. For four years, with only brief respites, Reims was besieged by German guns, which sometimes fired for a few hours, sometimes all day long, at the rate of one shell every three minutes, and again at night.
After that initial week of attacks, Abbés Landrieux and Thinot carried on ministering to the faithful of Reims. In this “total war” that the French were suddenly facing, the German shelling of Reims Cathedral would, in the end, account for some of the greatest damage the war would inflict. The Germans did not loosen their grip on Reims until October 1918, after 857 days of bombardment. During that time, life around the city was a terrifying disaster: Over three hundred people were hit directly by shells, and portions of the city were largely abandoned. But a remarkable number of townspeople remained, in hiding. More than five thousand people were killed in the bombardments and resulting fires. The German justification for shelling the cathedral was that the French were somehow using it for military purposes—as an observation tower to aim French artillery. The French denied it. There was no evidence to support the German allegation.
The day before the first shells would be fired on Reims, on September 3, 1914, the French government had evacuated tapestries and artworks from the town and other locations as part of a southward convoy. But the stained-glass windows had not been removed. The Historic Monuments Department began taking defensive measures (beyond evacuation of nonfixture artworks) at the cathedral only in 1915—many months after the outbreak of war—even as the bombardment continued. The measures included removal of statues and installation of sandbags and supports. Most stained-glass windows had by then been destroyed, but some had survived. But the authorities feared that construction of scaffolding in the cathedral might give the Germans the false impression that the cathedral was being used for military observation, furnishing the Germans with an excuse for further bombardment, and so remedial work on the windows was postponed.
At that point in the war, much of the population of Reims had remained in the city, and they stayed on for another year still, continuing their lives and work, adapting themselves courageously to the trying and dangerous circumstances. But in April 1917, the shelling resumed, eventually rising to a level previously unimagined, which included a stretch of four days punctuated with seven-hour periods in which German barrages struck at five-minute intervals. For quite some time after this, any further work on proactive preservation of historic monuments and stained glass was subordinated to more pressing matters.
What else would it take for the authorities to protect the French cathedrals and their stained-glass windows from war damage?