Despite all the interruptions, though, it was not much after noon when we reached Blangy.  Here, in that suburb of Arras, were the headquarters of the Ninth Division, and as I stepped out of the car I thrilled to the knowledge that I was treading ground forever to be famous as the starting-point of the Highland Brigade in the attack of April 9, 1917.

And now I saw Arras, and, for the first time, a town that had been systematically and ruthlessly shelled.  There are no words in any tongue I know to give you a fitting picture of the devastation of Arras.  “Awful” is a puny word, a thin one, a feeble one.  I pick impotently at the cover-lid of my imagination when I try to frame language to make you understand what it was I saw when I came to Arras on that bright June day.

I think the old city of Arras should never be rebuilt.  I doubt if it can be rebuilt, indeed.  But I think that, whether or no, a golden fence should be built around it, and it should forever and for all time be preserved as a monument to the wanton wickedness of the Hun.  It should serve and stand, in its stark desolation, as a tribute, dedicated to the Kultur of Germany.  No painter could depict the frightfulness of that city of the dead.  No camera could make you see as it is.  Only your eyes can do that for you.  And even then you cannot realize it all at once.  Your eyes are more merciful than the truth and the Hun.

The Germans shelled Arras long after there was any military reason for doing so.  The sheer, wanton love of destruction must have moved them.  They had destroyed its military usefulness, but still they poured shot and shell into the town.  I went through its streets—­the Germans had been pushed back so far by then that the city was no longer under steady fire.  But they had done their work!

Nobody was living in Arras.  No one could have lived there.  The houses had been smashed to pieces.  The pavements were dust and rubble.  But there was life in the city.  Through the ruins our men moved as ceaselessly and as restlessly as the tenants of an ant hill suddenly upturned by a plowshare.  Soldiers were everywhere, and guns—­guns, guns!  For Arras had a new importance now.  It was a center for many roads.  Some of the most important supply roads of this sector of the front converged in Arras.

Trains of ammunition trucks, supply carts and wagons of all sorts, great trucks laden with jam and meat and flour, all were passing every moment.  There was an incessant din of horses’ feet and the steady crunch—­crunch of heavy boots as the soldiers marched through the rubble and the brickdust.  And I knew that all this had gone on while the town was still under fire.  Indeed, even now, an occasional shell from some huge gun came crashing into the town, and there would be a new cloud of dust arising to mark its landing, a new collapse of some weakened wall.  Warning signs were everywhere about, bidding all who saw them to beware of the imminent collapse of some heap of masonry.