of Arras Cathedral ought to be cherished by German
commanders, for they have accomplished nothing more austerely
picturesque, more religiously impressive, more idiotically
sacrilegious, more exquisitely futile than their achievement here.
And they are adding to it weekly. As a spectacle, the Cathedral of
Rheims cannot compare with the Cathedral of Arras.

In the north transept a 325-mm. shell has knocked a clean hole
through which a mastodon might wriggle. Just opposite this
transept, amid universal wreckage, a cafe is miraculously
preserved. Its glass, mugs, counters, chairs, and ornaments are all
there, covered with white dust, exactly as they were left one night.
You could put your hand through a window aperture and pick up a
glass. Close by, the lovely rafter-work of an old house is exposed,
and, within, a beam has fallen from the roof to the ground. This
beam is burning. The flames are industriously eating away at it, like
a tiger gnawing in tranquil content at its prey which it has dragged to
a place of concealment. There are other fires in Arras, and have
been for some days. But what are you to do? A step further on is a
greengrocer's shop, open and doing business.

We gradually circled round the Cathedral until we arrived at the
Town Hall, built in the sixteenth century, very carefully restored in
the nineteenth, and knocked to pieces in the twentieth. We
approached it from the back, and could not immediately perceive
what had happened to it, for later erections have clustered round it,
and some of these still existed in their main outlines. In a great
courtyard stood an automobile, which certainly had not moved for
months. It was a wreck, overgrown with rust and pustules. This
automobile well symbolised the desolation, open and concealed, by
which it was surrounded. A touchingly forlorn thing, dead and deaf
to the never-ceasing, ever-reverberating chorus of the guns!

To the right of the Town Hall, looking at it from the rear, we saw a
curving double row of mounds of brick, stone, and refuse.
Understand: these had no resemblance to houses; they had no
resemblance to anything whatever except mounds of brick, stone,
and refuse. The sight of them acutely tickled my curiosity. "What is
this?"

"It is the principal street in Arras." The mind could picture it at once--
one of those narrow, winding streets which in ancient cities
perpetuate the most ancient habits of the citizens, maintaining their
commercial pr