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　　CHAPTER XIV

　　It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory that cost as much sometimes as defeat.

　　When I first went into Arras during its occupation by the French I remembered a day, fifteen months before, near the town of St.-Pol in Artois, where I was caught up in one of those tides of fugitives which in those early days of war used to roll back in a state of terror before the German invasion. “Where do they come from?” I asked, watching this long procession of gigs and farmers' carts and tramping women and children. The answer told me everything. “They are bombarding Arras, m'sieur.”

　　Since then “They” had never ceased to bombard Arras. From many points of view, as I had come through the countryside at night, I had seen the flashes of shells over that city and had thought of the agony inside. Four days before I went in first it was bombarded with one hundred and fifty seventeen-inch shells, each one of which would destroy a cathedral. It was with a sense of being near to death—not a pleasant feeling, you understand—that I went into Arras for the first time and saw what had happened to it.

　　I was very near to the Germans. 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, rooks had perched in the broken vaulting and flew with noisy wings above the ruined altars. Another sound came like a great beating of wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the vibration of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it fell with a clatter to the littered floor. On the way to the ruin of the bishop's chapel I passed a group of stone figures. They were the famous “Angels of Arras” removed from some other part of the building to what might have been a safer place.

　　Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. But in the chapel beyond, where the light streamed through the broken panes of stained-glass windows, one figure stood untouched in all this ruin. It was a tall statue of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and sorrow, as though in the presence of those who crucified Him.

　　Yet something more wonderful than this scene of tragedy lived in the midst of it. Yet there were still people living in Arras.

　　They lived an underground life, for the most part, coming up from the underworld to blink in the sunlight, to mutter a prayer or a curse or two, to gaze for a moment at any change made by a new day's bombardment, and then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun.

　　Through low archways just above the pavement, I looked down into some of the deep-vaulted cellars where the merchants used to stock their wine, and saw old women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over little stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with domestic work. Some of them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs stared into each other. The women's faces were lined and their eyes sunken. They had the look of people who have lived through many agonies and have more to suffer.

　　Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a greengrocer's shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into another shop and bought some picture post-cards of the ruins within a few yards of it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed because she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-inch shell had burst fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was close enough for death. I marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was it courage or stupidity?

　　One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way and called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly killed a hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old woman's cackling laugh and said, “Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?” which did not seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the streets of Arras I saw small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. “Are you afraid of the shells?” I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled. They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead shells were howling. Their city was stricken with death. These women lived like witches in a cave—a strange and dreadful life.

　　I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind—probably for beet sugar—and then a street of small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-bags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the red-brick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai... The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.

　　The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were many places where one had to step quietly and duck one's head, or get behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper's bullet or the rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

　　As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way. Now It Can Be Told