"In the midst of the reviving fields lay Noyon: Noyon, that gem of the Oise, whose delicate outline of spires and soft tinted roofs had graced the wide valley for centuries. Today the little city lay blanched and shapeless between the hills, as all towns were left that stood in the path of the armies. The cathedral alone reared its battered bulk in the midst; a resisting pile, its two grim and blunted towers frowning into the sky. Nobly Gothic through all the shattering, the great church rose out of the wreckage, with flying buttresses still outspread like brooding wings to the dead houses that had sunk about her."