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. No more than ten yards away, when I
stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the
suburb of Blangy--it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a
piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of
sand-bags--and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy's
lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras,
where no trains ever traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been
encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried to batter
a way into and through it. An endless battle had surged up against its
walls, but in spite of all their desperate attacks no German soldier had
set foot inside the city except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands of
young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it.
The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and blood and the
spirit of heroic men, but he had destroyed the city bit by bit. It was
pitiful beyond all expression. It was worse than looking upon a woman
whose beauty had been scarred by bloody usage.
For Arras was a city of beauty--a living expression in stone of all the
idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and gracious
place. Even then, after a year's bombardment, some spiritual exhalation
of human love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I entered
the city and wandered a little in its public gardens before going into
its dead heart--the Grande Place--I felt the strange survival. The trees
here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up
those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down.
Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and slashed,
but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went through many
long streets and passed long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful
in their silence and desolation and ruin.
Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an enormous building
of the Renaissance, not beautiful, but impressive in its spaciousness
and dignity. Next to it was the bishop's palace, with long corridors
and halls, and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the fury of
great shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in girth as giant trees
had been snapped off to the base. The dome of the cathedral opened with
a yawning chasm. High explosives burst through the walls. The keystones
of arches were blown out, and masses of masonry were piled into the nave
and aisles.
As I stood there, 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
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. But in a moment of rare
silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet
voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and
I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly
way.