. No more than ten yards away, when I
stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the
suburb of Blangy--it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a
piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of
sand-bags--and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy's
lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras,
where no trains ever traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been
encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried to batter
a way into and through it. An endless battle had surged up against its
walls, but in spite of all their desperate attacks no German soldier had
set foot inside the city except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands of
young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it.

The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and blood and the
spirit of heroic men, but he had destroyed the city bit by bit. It was
pitiful beyond all expression. It was worse than looking upon a woman
whose beauty had been scarred by bloody usage.

For Arras was a city of beauty--a living expression in stone of all the
idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and gracious
place. Even then, after a year's bombardment, some spiritual exhalation
of human love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I entered
the city and wandered a little in its public gardens before going into
its dead heart--the Grande Place--I felt the strange survival. The trees
here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up
those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down.

Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and slashed,
but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went through many
long streets and passed long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful
in their silence and desolation and ruin.

Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an enormous building
of the Renaissance, not beautiful, but impressive in its spaciousness
and dignity. Next to it was the bishop's palace, with long corridors
and halls, and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the fury of
great shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in girth as giant trees
had been snapped off to the base. The dome of the cathedral opened with
a yawning chasm. High explosives burst through the walls. The keystones
of arches were blown out, and masses of masonry were piled into the nave
and aisles.

As I stood there,