MY SUNDAY IN CAMBRAI.

Otago Witness, Issue 3382, 8 January 1919, Page 55

MY SUNDAY IN CAMBRAI.

By Captain J. A. F. Ozanne

It was a Sunday never to be forgotten, for the Huns had only quite recently left Cambrai. Even as one walked down the street towards the battered cathedral of the martyr city one heard the crash of shells as they fell in another quarter of the town. The Boche knows that he will never enter Cambrai again, unless he passes through it on his way to some prison camp in the rear: but he evidently wanted to do as much damage as possible while his guns were vet within range. The cathedral itself presented a touching appearance, with its smashed windows and scarred walls- As one entered one saw statues of the saints which had been hurled from their niches, while the floor was strewn with powdered debris. A British working party was busy salving vestments and altar-cloths, which lying half-buried beneath a pile of broken plaster and powdered masonry. High up on one wall one could see a chair hanging from a twisted chandelier. Whether it had been hurled there by a German soldier or by a bursting shell it would be difficult to say 4 In a side chapel mass was being, celebrated. About a couple of ...' hundred British soldiers, with the mud of the battlefield on their khaki uniforms, wers kneeling on the stone flags before the altar, whose only decoration consisted in a bunch of roses, which a poor old woman had handed to the priest as he was vesting for mass. Two war-stained French poilus acted as servers, and I heard afterwards that they too were priests. There were a few French officers amongst the congregation, and six civilians—three old women and three old men. Tha colebraut of the mass was a cure in the city, who had stuck to his parish during the" four years of tho German occupation, and at the end, in spite of the

work of pillage and wholesale destruction by -which the spite of the Germans found expression, this priest managed to stay behind with half a dozen of his flock—the six civilians who were assisting at mass. At the end of mass the cure, in a voice broken wtih emotion, said : "In the name of the exiled Archbishop and people of Cambrai, I thank you, British soldiers, for the succour which you have brought to this old city of the Merovingian kings, and by which you -have freed it from a servitude that was little removed from slavery." Monseigneur Ohollet, Archbishop of Cambrai and Primate of Picardy, was so disgusted with the conduct of the Germans and their exactions on the townspeople that he actually wrote a letter of expostulation. and appeal to the Kaiser. Wilhelm's answer was to send two officers to the Archbishop with the following message:—" The Emperor cannot read your letter, for it was much too long." " Tell your Emperor," replied the Archbishop, " that one of my predecessors in this see, Fenelon, wrote a letter to Louis XIV which was far stronger and longer than mine, and Louis XIV was a very different person from the Kaiser." It takes more than four years of even Hun brutality to break a Frenchman's indomitable spirit. The Boche, being a fool, cannot understand the French character. Because the average Frenchman is by nature kindly and courteous, the German, who judges from pre-civilisation standards, imagines that such courtesy is but the outward expression of servility. A very brief sojourn among the peasantry of France suffices to convince the ordinary man of intelligence that the humblest Frenchman has his amour propre. With all his courtesy and kindliness there is, at the same time, a quiet. dignity which demands, and obtains, respect. "Noblesse oblige" is his motto, and he lives up to it.