The Postcard
A carte postale which was posted in Reims on the 3rd. November 1909 to:
Miss Nevill,
Mill Lawn,
Reigate,
Angleterre
The message on the back of the card was as follows:
"Reims.
Left Amiens this morning at 9.30,
arrived here at 7. Very wet day.
Tyre on large car burst and we
stuck in the mud and had to be
pulled out by 3 horses.
All well but rather tired".
Reims Cathedral in the Great War
The Cathedral was reduced to a roofless shell by the 287 explosive and incendiary shells that rained on it during the course of the Great War.
A Poem by Grace Conkling
Grace Hazard Conkling (1878-1958) wrote a poem about Reims Cathedral in 1914:
'A wingèd death has smitten dumb thy bells,
And poured them molten from thy tragic towers:
Now are the windows dust that were thy flowers
Patterned like frost, petalled like asphodels.
Gone are the angels and the archangels,
The saints, the little lamb above thy door,
The shepherd Christ! They are not, any more,
Save in the soul where exiled beauty dwells.
But who has heard within thy vaulted gloom
That old divine insistence of the sea,
When music flows along the sculptured stone
In tides of prayer, for him thy windows bloom'.
Like faithful sunset, warm immortally!
Thy bells live on, and Heaven is in their tone!'
In fact the bells of Reims Cathedral did not melt, although they did fall. The solidified pools of metal on the floor of the Cathedral actually came from the covering of lead on the roof which had melted when the wooden structure blazed from end to end.
Molten lead also flowed from the medieval stained glass windows, and poured through the gargoyles designed to channel rain from the roof. The gargoyles were not designed for the roof itself to pour out of them.
Reims Cathedral Before the Great War
If you want to see what Reims Cathedral looked like before the Great War, please search for the tag 32RCB34
Rouen Cathedral
If Grace had wanted to write about bells which really did melt, she could have waited another 30 years and written about Rouen Cathedral. This was bombed by the Germans in the Second World War, leading inter alia to a fire in the medieval north tower containing the famous bells.
The tower acted as a chimney for the extensive woodwork inside to burn and create very high temperatures - sufficient to calcify the ancient stonework and leave pools of molten bell metal at the base of the tower.
You can see more about Rouen Cathedral if you search for the tag 87RCL55
The Use of Artillery in the Great War
Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War. The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.
With an average length of two feet, that number of shells if laid end to end would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres). That's over two and a half times round the Earth. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.
During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.
Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.
According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:
- Bayonets - less than 1%
- Bullets - 30%
- Artillery and Bombs - 70%
Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.
Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:
"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."
To this day, large quantities of Great War matériel are discovered on a regular basis. Many shells from the Great War were left buried in the mud, and often come to the surface during ploughing and land development.
For example, on the Somme battlefields in 2009 there were 1,025 interventions, unearthing over 6,000 pieces of ammunition weighing 44 tons.
Artillery shells may or may not still be live with explosive or gas, so the bomb disposal squad, of the Civilian Security of the Somme, dispose of them.
The Somme Times
From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:
'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'
