Page 39 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

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fiercest.’
Later she would visit other places whose names had become
synonymous with conflict and death – Bethune, La Bassee,
Loos, Lens, Vimy Ridge and Arras. All were in ruins – Lens ‘a
rubbish heap … said to be the most completely obliterated of any
French town’, Arras a mass of broken masonry, its inhabitants
sheltering in cellars from the devastation above ground, Vimy the
site of over 10,000 Canadian casualties in 1917 and soon to be
earmarked as the site of a memorial to the Canadian fallen. But
already, refugees were returning, finding shelter in the ruins and
beginning to reconstruct lives shattered and transformed by four
years of war.
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As her train approached Reims, Lizzie searched the horizon
for a first sight of its Cathedral of Notre Dame, its towers rising
above the tiled roofs of the town, as she remembered it from
visits before the war. Repeatedly shelled by the enemy in the
course of the war, the cathedral had taken almost three hundred
hits, and had become a potent symbol both of French suffering
and of German barbarism. Shocked by the destruction through
which she passed, Lizzie was yet more deeply affected by the
ruinous state of the great church, its roof and glorious stained
glass shattered, the neighbouring Archbishop’s Palace razed to
the ground, trees already pushing up through the rubble of
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surrounding buildings. Already, however, work had begun to
clear the debris and repair and restore one of France’s most
historic buildings. It was a task which would take almost two
decades to complete, and one in which Lizzie herself, although
she did not yet know it, would play a notable part.

12 Day in, day out, pp 200-202.
13 Ibid, pp 202-203.
14 Ibid, pp 203-204.
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