But
it is far worse than cruel--it is idiotic in its immense futility. The
perfect idiocy of the thing overwhelms you. And to your reason it is
monstrous that one population should overrun another with murder
and destruction from political covetousness as that two populations
should go to war concerning a religious creed. Indeed, it is more
monstrous. It is an obscene survival, a phenomenon that has
strayed through some negligence of fate, into the wrong century.
Strange, in an adjoining quarter, partly but not utterly destroyed, a
man is coming home in a cab with luggage from the station, and the
servant-girl waits for him at the house-door. And I heard of a case
where a property-owner who had begun to build a house just before
the war has lately resumed building operations. In the Esplanade
Ceres the fountain is playing amid all the ravage; and the German
trenches, in that direction, are not more than two miles away.
It is quite impossible for any sane man to examine the geography of
the region of destruction which I have so summarily described
without being convinced that the Germans, in shelling it, were simply
aiming at the Cathedral. Tracing the streets affected, one can follow
distinctly the process of their searching for the precise range of the
Cathedral. Practically the whole of the damage is concentrated on
the line of the Cathedral.
But the Cathedral stands.
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