FANES OF FRANCE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 119, 22 May 1941, Page 10

FANES OF FRANCE

UNSCATHED BY WAR MASTERPIECES OF BEAUTY

(By ROSE PATTERSON)

LONDON, March 31. It would appear from pictorial evidence that has now reached this country from occupied France that last year's fighting has left the great French cathedrals practically unscathed. We owe this knowledge to a French artist who set out last autumn to make drawings of the cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais and Rheims amid the bombed and shell-shattered buildings around them.

Amiens on the left bank of the Somme, 81 miles from Paris, saw the start of the great British counteroffensive against the Germans in 1918 which marked the beginning of the end of the Great War. On the morning of August 8, in a thick fog, 2000 Allied guns put up their barrage behind which the tanks and the British infantry advanced, pushing back the German front eight or nine miles by nightfall. Three nights later the Allied forces had reached the old German line as it existed before the battles of the Somme and the 1917 retreat of Hindenburg. The houses, so well known to British and American visitors, that used to be close to the walls of Amiens Cathedral are now in ruins, but the shells and the bombs seem, fortunately, to have missed the edifice itself. The Cathedral of Notre Dame of Amiens dates mostly from the thirteenth century, its towers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its spire and magnificent choir stalls from the early sixteenth. The three majestic portals of its west front and the beautiful 60ft arches within make it a masterpiece of balance, grace and strength. And we can all hope to see it again. Rheims Cathedral, opened with such great ceremony when at last it had been reconstructed after the shelling and the fires of the Great War had assailed it so terribly, is depicted with sandbags protecting the famed carving of its west front. Rheims was another jewel of the thirteenth century (towers , early fifteenth), the originality of its design lying in the presence of a double aisle and the profusion of its exterior. Chartres, so lovely that there is surely a lump in tHe throat and a catch in the breath of any mortal who beholds and then enters it even for the thousandth time! Most of its glorious stained glass was removed before hostilities began and placed in safety. • It is a comfort to think that the ungovernable anger of men who came nearly 1000 years after its builders has not effaced the beauty of its massive bell towers its royal portal, its flying buttresses or 1110 ?. treasu ' - es of its interior. Inat other unfinished symphonv in stone—Beauvais Cathedral of bamt Pierre—is renowned for its gigantic proportions. The Nazis have not yet succeeded in stopping it from reaching as high as it possibly could toward heaven, nor It is believed the cathedral at Strasbourg (begun again in 1176 after a nre had destroyed the eleventh century edifice) is also intact, though the Nazis are said to be converting it into a German national memorial and to have closed it to worshippers Its delicate lace-like spire is still