Town Hall. Comparing this sketch with an engraved view taken from
exactly the same spot, one can see graphically what had occurred.
A few arches of the ground-floor colonnade had survived in outline.
Of the upper part of the facade nothing was left save a fragment of
wall showing two window-holes. The rest of the facade, and the
whole of the roof, was abolished. The later building attached to the
left of the facade had completely disappeared. The carved masonry
of the earlier building to the right of the facade had survived in a
state of severe mutilation. The belfry which, rising immediately
behind the Town Hall, was once the highest belfry in France (nearly
250 feet), had vanished. The stump of it, jagged like the stump of a
broken tooth, obstinately persisted, sticking itself up to a level a few
feet higher than the former level of the crest of the roof. The vast
ruin was heaped about with refuse.

Arras is not in Germany. It is in France. I mention this fact because it
is notorious that Germany is engaged in a defensive war, and in a
war for the upholding of the highest civilisation. The Germans came
all the way across Belgium, and thus far into France, in order to
defend themselves against attack. They defaced and destroyed all
the beauties of Arras, and transformed it into a scene of desolation
unsurpassed in France, so that the highest civilisation might remain
secure and their own hearths intact. One wonders what the
Germans would have done had they been fighting, not a war of
defence and civilisation, but a war of conquest and barbarism. The
conjecture may, perhaps, legitimately occupy the brains of citizens.
In any case, the French Government would do well to invite to such
places as Arras, Soissons, and Senlis groups of Mayors of the cities
of all countries, so that these august magistrates may behold for
themselves and realise in their souls what defensive war and the
highest civilisation actually do mean when they come to the point.

Personally, I am against a policy of reprisals, and yet I do not see
how Germany can truly appreciate what she has done unless an
object-lesson is created for her out of one of her own cities. And she
emphatically ought to appreciate what she has done. One city would
suffice. If, at the end of the war, Cologne were left as Arras was
when I visited it, a definite process of education would have been
accomplished in the Teutonic mind. The event would be hard on
Cologne, but no