rashing into
the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked
like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their
pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of
the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels
beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the German lines, and I
went along them when one line of men was going into battle and another
was coming back, wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the
fumes of gas in their lungs--their steel hats clinking as they groped
past one another. In vaults each side of these passages men played cards
on barrels, to the light of candles stuck in bottles, or slept until
their turn to fight, with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the
Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long
queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons who were working
in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One day there were three
thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or
men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward to the dark
passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. On the grass outside lay
men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way past the station to
the Arras-Cambrai road was a death-trap for our transport and I saw the
bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick
on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern side of the city,
lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman on "point duty"
on the Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel helmet,
as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the
scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house
above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to
Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the road
beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way.
They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells
plowing holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one
morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep.
They were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of
labor in their sweat.

Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe.
I saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched
by fire, and afterward when there w