As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the
Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings
to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep
of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a
dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for
brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras
sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days
about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old
city’s life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down
a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the
houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was
in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those
gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile
after many disasters.
I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of
scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some
serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had
never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one’s
fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are
hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or
the glimpse of a flower.
But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as
something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the
shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity.
Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture
or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at
all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise
known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and
sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and
cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar
trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the
guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
floor.
I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
remains.
And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
forlorn rooms when all else is scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that the sympathy
turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
guns, lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
left that appeals to you.
As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a
railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds,
and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and
purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had
ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:
sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation
among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in
all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron
tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind
dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.