town have suffered very little. Here and there
a house has been crushed and one or two have been bisected, the front
reduced to a heap of splinters and the back halves of the rooms left
so that one sees the bed, the hanging end of the carpet, the clothes
cupboard yawning open, the pictures still on the wall. In one place
a lamp stands on a chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off
completely from the world below.... Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_ One would
be irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of London, if
it were not for those unmeaning explosions.

I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board requested
us to walk around the silent square on the outside pavement and not
across it. The German sausage balloon had not been up for days; it had
probably gone off to the Somme; the Somme was a terrible vortex just
then which was sucking away the resources of the whole German line; but
still discipline is discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any
moment over the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was
fought for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged
breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where the
porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length of the
platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type, with a glass
roof whose framework still remains, though the glass powders the floor
and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot. The rails are rails of
rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall grasses grow amidst the
ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered from a shell or so, but there
are still the sofas of green plush, askew, a little advertisement hung
from the wall, the glass smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had
scattered a great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to
Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on. These tickets are souvenirs
too portable to resist. I gave way to that common weakness.

I went out and looked up and down the line; two deserted goods trucks
stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass poked out
through their wheels. The railway signals seemed uncertain in their
intimations; some were up and some were down. And it was as still and
empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii. No train has come into Arras for
two long years now.

We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but are
weary of it, and we disputed about Irish politic