stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
this that had opened the door.

Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.

As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or the
wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.

She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.

A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' heads on his collar, showed
me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
cathedral's interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
which the mind fumbled.

I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
altar.

And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
touch of irony the Frenchman said, "All