One hundred years ago this week all Australian papers were publishing, with embellishments, stories of how the Huns, in their infidel barbarity, had been shelling the ancient cathedral at Rheims in France one of the most important buildings in Christendom. The Allies were to make great propaganda uses of the atrocity.
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The Wangaratta Chronicle reported "BURNING OF RHEIMS CATHEDRAL
"Further particulars of the destruction of Rheims Cathedral have been supplied by an eyewitness of the Germans' vandalism. This person states that four Sisters of Mercy lay dead on the floor. [In the ruins] women knelt around in prayer apparently beseeching the intercession of Joan of Arc, whose statue within the Cathedral [pictured], like that outside, remained unharmed. One shell had reduced the statue of the Virgin to dust.
"The belfry fell with a tremendous crash, and presently the building resembled a gigantic set piece of fireworks."
The Maffra Spectator seethed that: "The wanton destruction of Rheims cathedral is a crime for which the Germans should never be forgiven ... it was not only one of the finest specimens of Northern French Gothic in existence, but it was also the national cathedral of France in the sense in which Westminster Abbey is looked upon by the British race.
"No religious, historic or artistic considerations, however, have any weight with the 'cultured' soldiers of pious. The Prussians can never fear any reprisals, for if tawdry, meretricious Berlin were razed to the ground tomorrow no one would lament it except, perhaps, the swashbuckling savages who throng its and dens of infamy."
