August 2 2, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
15 
How Will They Rebuild?: By H. Belloc 
MANY things are doubtful in the future that shall 
surceed the war, but one thing is certain and 
that is the rebuilding of the destroyed villages 
and towns. 
Let it be supposed that there be no more 
destruction or little more than, has already taken place, 
there will certainly have to be rebuilt some hundreds of 
villages in their entirety, and thousands upon thousands 
of hamlets, isolated farms, and country houses. There are 
a score of great towns wiiich must be restored, and two or 
tliree which must be almost wholly renewed : Rheims, for 
instance, and certainly Ypres. It will be a matter of great 
consequence to the world how this is done — as to its style 
and outer aspect, that is. For what men look upon is not 
only an expression of the time in which the work was done. 
It is also a background colouring all our present lives and a 
function of continuity with the past. And all the world 
is influenced bv France. 
No area in the world, not even any that you might select 
from those parts of Italy most packed with the past, had 
evidences of such continuity or such effect upon the beholder 
as the area of Picardy and Champagne and upon the marches 
of the Isle de France which have been devastated, especially 
in the later" phases of this war. 
The war has bit.ten into the fringe of that centre (stretch- 
ing from Chartrcs to Rethel and from Chalons to Rouen) 
in which the great transformation of the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, when the modern nations were founded, 
first arrived at an outward expression and produced the 
Gothic. 
Suger was the first to build in that new st\ie ; his tower 
still stands at St. Denis, the monument of the great change. 
Then came tlie Apse of Notre Dame in Paris, designed for 
the; round arch of the Dark Ages, an^ having already the 
thick, strong pillars standing, when the happy accident of 
a fire permitted the rebuilding, and the earliest of the great 
Gothic structures in Europe arose. There spread outward 
in a ring from Paris the effect of this. You had not only 
the principal examples of Chartres, of Rheims, of Bourges, 
of Beauvais, of Rouen, of Amiens, but a transformation 
everywhere of that form in building which is the external 
clothing of human life. 
When they rebuild what will they do ? They cannot 
restore the Gothic in the towns and villages that have gone. 
Fortunately, the French have a powerful school of archi- 
tecture directly continuous with the past, and noble in 
character. It derives principally from Mansard. 
As is commonly true of the arts its originators in the 
seventeenth century gave the greatest and the best examples. 
But there has been no great degeneration. The framework 
has stood firm, and the whole nation is so accustomed to the 
type that it can be reproduced everywhere with reasonable 
success. This method of building, which might almost be 
called "official" and w'hich has produced the solid and 
dignified public buildings of the last 200 years, will be that 
employed in the rebuilding if the French are wise. We 
must remember that the main building material of the 
invaded districts (save in the northern part of Picardy), 
is stone, and that, therefore, whatever is done will be done 
permanentlv and cannot be undone. 
The tradition of Mansard does not lend itself to the re- 
construction of the churches. Some of Mansard's own best 
work — thd Dome of the Invalides, for instance— is seen in 
great churches, but the village church cannot be built upon 
this model, and here (though it sounds a contradiction of 
what has just been written above) the best chance of avoid- 
ing error is surely to return to the simplicity of the round arch, 
and to the tradition which is called in this country Norman, 
upon the Continent, "Roman," which last, of course, is the 
less provincial and truer term. 
Perhaps the most astonishing piece of modern work in 
the way of^perpetuating the spirit of antiquity is the Basilica 
of St. Martin of Tours, small and admirable: you walk there 
into the fifth century. The Champagne country, especially, 
retains t|iat tradition : and though the great model of St. 
Remv has been partially destroyed, the whole province is 
familiar with examples upon every side. 
Underneath the whole matter, of course, lies the question 
of finance. It is already a fixed principle in the public opinion 
of the Allied nations that the Central Empires which were 
wholly and solely guilty of this terrible crime should be com- 
pelled, within the measure of what is possible, to pay the bill 
for the damage thoy have caused. In the case of the Germans 
this damage, for a great part of it, has been deliberate and 
wanton. The Belgian town of Dinant, for instance, unique 
in character as it hung to its rocky ledge over the river, was 
brutally destrojxd in a sort of drunken orgy, distinguished 
by the massacre of little children and their mothers. The 
partial destruction of the Cathedral of Rheims was just as 
wanton, the proof being that the German commanders — 
surprised by the universal horror they had excited — rliecked 
the zeal of their subordinates early in the process, and left 
the shell of the building standing. 
We must compel the enemy to pay, that is, to work, for the 
reparation of the damage he. has done. 
Rebuilding in the East 
There will be two other fields of rebuilding (always sup- 
posing that there is not much greater destruqtion between 
this and the conclusion of peace), the one in Eastern Europe, 
over the field which is for the most part Poland," the other 
in Italy. 
The Italian district has suffered little save upon the two 
belts of fighting, the first on the Isonzo, the second on the 
Piave lines. Certain towns have been hurt by bombing 
from the air, notably Padua, and to a much less extent, 
Venice ; but the mass of the Italian buildings in the Fritili 
are intact. 
An exception must, unfortunately,, be made in the matter 
of the churches. Those graceful, tall, square bell-towers, 
which mark all the Venetian Plain, and of which many, 
raised but recently by the piety of the villagers, showed 
how little the native taste of Italy had been affected by 
modern degradation, have fallen m great numbers. It was 
inevitable, for they were observation posts which neither 
party to the struggle could leave standing (though here, 
as everywhere else, the responsibility for their destruction 
ultimately falls, and falls directly and without question, 
upon the Powers that desired and launched the war, Austria 
and Germany). Restoration will, however, be both practic- 
able and rapid. The style of building is upon one type and 
thoroughly familiar to all local workmen and the materials 
are ready to hand. , 
The worst destruction has been on the little known and' 
isolated Asiago Plateau. Here ail the Jiabitations of men 
must be rebuilt. Its desolation resembles the Nvorst of the 
landscapes to be seen in the invaded part of France. But 
the area is restricted, and restriction should not present any 
lengthy difficulties. 
There remains the enormous eastern belt over which the 
armies have passed and repassed until it has been ground 
as in, a mill. What shall be the fate of rebuilding there? 
The .common intj^ression that nothing east of the Elbe 
counts in Europe in the way of art has a sound foundation. 
North Germany is negligible, especially since the absurd 
insufficiency of Prussia has afflicted it like a blight ; there 
is nothing in modern Berlin wjiich ought not to disappear, 
and the destruction of such offences as the Earls Court 
monstrosity which the Hohenzollerns have built for their 
residence at Posen is almost a duty. Unfortunately North 
Germany has not suffered any appreciable invasion or the 
loss of any of its deplorable monuments. But there is 
a large exception to the general poverty of architecture 
beyond the Elbe, which exception is the Church and Castle 
architecture of^ Poland. Cracow, with its magnificent Citadel, 
and the Cathedral wherein are aligned the tombs of. all the 
Polish heroes, has happilj" been spared. Warsaw has suffered 
only from occasional air bombing and its monuments are 
(we are told) intact. 
Apart from the main cities which have upon the whole 
been spared, there are a certain number of centres in which 
the essentially Western civilisation of Poland produced con- 
siderable monuments, and these, where they have been 
damaged, must "be restored. The task should be simple 
enough, for wc have no reason to believe that any of these 
have been destroyed. The main work in Poland will be 
the reconstruction cf mere habitation. But we shall have to 
impose upon the enemy after victory his full proportion of 
jmyment in material, labour, or money for this work. No- 
whei'e has his action been more savage and nowhere does he 
owe more reparation. Just as the reconstruction of Poland 
politically will be the test of Allied succsss, or the failure 
to restore that State the proof of Allied defeat, so will be the 
material reconstruction of Polish homes at once a duty and 
a political necessity imposed upon the civilised Powers. 
