DSSTRUCTION OF RHEIMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1844, 25 June 1918, Page 1

DSSTRUCTION OF RHEIMS.

Excepting for some devastated streets, where a few ghosts of houses may be seen, Rheims is today no more than a desert. The crime of four years’ commission is consummated. For the whole of one week in April, the enemy was firing from Brirnont, from Vitry, and from Nogent PAbes.se. Huge guns hurled on the passive city over 100,000 projectiles. On Friday, April 12th, German rage was enhanced into a veritable frenzy. The number of missiles fired on the city exceeded 30,000, and the Germans used every kind of means of destruction that their genius for evil could devise. Austrian percussion and fuse shells to the number respectively of 77,130 and 210,380 fell ceaselessly on the ill-star-red city, accompanied by asphyxiating and incendiary shells. The fire that started was soon leaping from one block of houses to another, and by evening the conflagration was so great.that two of the allies’ aviators, who had set out on a mission of 100 miles into the German linos, wore lighted up all the way by the brasier-like glare from the cathedral city. Everything is twisted, melted, and commingled by fire. All the historic tokens, all works of art —everything is one mass of embers and dust-cloud. The arched roofs of the cathedral are splitting and crumbling, stone by stone; soon nothing will remain of the proud monument but the pillars. The city had already been evacuated by its inhabitants, who, from numbering 120,000 in times of peace, fell to 3,500 in the course of the last months, and now to zero.