rooks had perched in the broken vaulting and flew with
noisy wings above the ruined altars. Another sound came like a great
beating of wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the vibration
of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it fell with a clatter
to the littered floor. On the way to the ruin of the bishop's chapel I
passed a group of stone figures. They were the famous "Angels of Arras"
removed from some other part of the building to what might have been a
safer place.

Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. But in the
chapel beyond, where the light streamed through the broken panes of
stained-glass windows, one figure stood untouched in all this ruin.
It was a tall statue of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and
sorrow, as though in the presence of those who crucified Him.

Yet something more wonderful than this scene of tragedy lived in the
midst of it. Yet there were still people living in Arras.

They lived an underground life, for the most part, coming up from the
underworld to blink in the sunlight, to mutter a prayer or a curse or
two, to gaze for a moment at any change made by a new day's bombardment,
and then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun.

Through low archways just above the pavement, I looked down into some of
the deep-vaulted cellars where the merchants used to stock their wine,
and saw old women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over little
stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with domestic work. Some
of them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs stared into each
other. The women's faces were lined and their eyes sunken. They had
the look of people who have lived through many agonies and have more to
suffer.

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a
greengrocer's shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into another
shop and bought some picture post-cards of the ruins within a few yards
of it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed
because she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-inch shell
had burst fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was close enough
for death. I marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was it
courage or stupidity?

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way and
called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly killed
a hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old woman's