cackling laugh and said, "Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?" which did not
seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the streets of Arras I
saw small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in
the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. "Are you afraid of the
shells?" I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled. They had got
used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with
a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash. In one of
the vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in,
there lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for
a franc or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay.
Overhead shells were howling. Their city was stricken with death. These
women lived like witches in a cave--a strange and dreadful life.

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to
a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great
factory of some kind--probably for beet sugar--and then a street of
small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own
suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and
houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-bags,
and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers
of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost
in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the
enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk
very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which
was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary,
for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars
and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through
a chink no wider than my finger I could see the red-brick ruins of the
houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai... The road to Douai
as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were
many places where one had to step quietly and duck one's head, or get
behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper's bullet or the
rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its
ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French
guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries