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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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