On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
standing still.
They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
while others still wore green.
I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
place for the worship of little weeds.
Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
what to do.
But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet’s most tragic fancies.
In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil’s stem.
The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
how it stood.
In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
this that had opened the door.
Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop’s servant, or the
wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes’ heads on his collar, showed
me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
cathedral’s interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
which the mind fumbled.
I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
altar.
And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
touch of irony the Frenchman said, “All that is necessary to bring
your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.”, “No,”
I said, “I will do it by describing all this.” And we both laughed.
I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws’ nests.