ead nodded and smiling wanly,
accosted me again.

Coming thither I looked into a square opening with a flight of steps
leading down into a subterranean chamber, and upon these steps a
woman sat knitting busily. She enquired if I wished to view the
catacombs, and pointed where a lamp burned above another opening and
other steps descended lower yet, seemingly into the very bowels of
the earth. To her I explained that my time was limited and all I
wished to see lay above ground, and from her I learned that some few
people yet remained in ruined Arras, who, even as she, lived
underground, since every day at irregular intervals the enemy fired
into the town haphazard. Only that very morning, she told me, another
shell had struck the poor Hotel de Ville, and she pointed to a new,
white scar upon the shapeless tower. She also showed me an ugly rent
upon a certain wall near by, made by the shell which had killed her
husband. Yes, she lived all alone now, she told me, waiting for that
good day when the Boches should be driven beyond the Rhine, waiting
until the townsfolk should come back and Arras wake to life again:
meantime she knitted.

Presently I saluted this solitary woman, and, turning away, left her
amid the desolate ruin of that once busy square, her beshawled head
bowed above feverishly busy fingers, left her as I had found
her--waiting.

And now as I traversed those deserted streets it seemed that this
seemingly dead city did but swoon after all, despite its many
grievous wounds, for here was life even as the woman had said;
evidences of which I saw here and there, in battered stovepipes that
had writhed themselves snake-like through rusty cellar gratings and
holes in wall or pavement, miserable contrivances at best, whose
fumes blackened the walls whereto they clung. Still, nowhere was
there sound or sight of folk save in one small back street, where, in
a shop that apparently sold everything, from pickles to picture
postcards, two British soldiers were buying a pair of braces from a
smiling, haggard-eyed woman, and being extremely polite about it in
cryptic Anglo-French; and here I foregathered with my companions. Our
way led us through the railway station, a much-battered ruin, its
clock tower half gone, its platforms cracked and splintered, the iron
girders of its great, domed roof bent and twisted, and with never a
sheet of glass anywhere. Between the rusty tracks grass and weeds
grew and flourished, and the