KULTUR IN A CEMETERY

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3113, 18 June 1917, Page 6

KULTUR IN A CEMETERY

AND SACRILEGE.

. Mr. Philip Gibbs, in the "Daily Telegraph," describing a visit to Lia'nconrs, says of the cemetery of the little church which stands in the grounds of the pillaged and destroyed chateau:—

It is full of vaults and tombs where ln-y the dust of French citizens, men, women, and chilrireu who died beforetlte hori'oi- of this year. The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tombstones were split across and graves exposed. Into these little houses of thb dead—a young girl had lain in one of them—rubbish had been flung. From one vault the coffin had been taken away.

. . . The church had been a little gem, with, a tall, pointed spire. Not, by shellfire, but by an explosive placed there the <lay before the Germans went away, the spiro had been fluiis: down and one end of the church blown clean aivay. 'I'll* face of its clock lav upon the rubbishheap. The sanctuary had bfen opened and the reliquaries smashed. The statues of the sainte had been overturned, β-nd the vestments of the pritst trampled and torn. T weut into the village of Creme'ry not far away. Here also .the "raves liadbeen opened in the churchyard, and in the church the relics of saints had been looted—a queer kind of loot for German homes—and in the sacristy lino old books of prayer and music lay tattered on the floor.. The Infant Jesus and the Wiee Men of the East and that cow that looked into the crib on Christmas night had been placed by some German humorist with their heads through, the bars of the sacristy window, looking out to that churchyard where the tombs yawned open by the work of German picks. ____________