French had fought ferociously, burrowing below
earth at the Labyrinth--sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches,
an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by frequent
rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and hands,
flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in
the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth,
until in February of '16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who
came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen
there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below
Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.

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