I saw what the Germans had left of the stately old Cathedral, and of the famous Cloth Hall—­one of the very finest examples of the guild halls of medieval times.  Goths—­Vandals—­no, it is unfair to seek such names for the Germans.  They have established themselves as the masters of all time in brutality and in destruction.  There is no need to call them anything but Germans.  The Cloth Hall was almost human in its pitiful appeal to the senses and the imagination.  The German fire had picked it to pieces, so that it stood in a stark outline, like some carcase picked bare by a vulture.

Our soldiers who were quartered nearby lived outside the town in huts.  They were the men of the Highland Brigade, and the ones I had hoped and wished, above all others, to meet when I came to France.  They received our party with the greatest enthusiasm, and they were especially flattering when they greeted me.  One of the Highland officers took me in hand immediately, to show me the battlefield.

The ground over which we moved had literally been churned by shell-fire.  It was neither dirt nor mud that we walked upon; it was a sort of powder.  The very soil had been decomposed into a fine dust by the terrific pounding it had received.  The dust rose and got into our eyes and mouths and nostrils.  There was a lot of sneezing among the members of the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour that day at Arras!  And the wire!  It was strewn in every direction, with seeming aimlessness.  Heavily barbed it was, and bad stuff to get caught in.  One of the great reasons for the preliminary bombardment that usually precedes an attack is to cut this wire.  If charging men are caught in a bad tangle of wire they can be wiped out by machine gun-fire before they can get clear.

I asked a Highlander, one day, how long he thought the war would last.

“Forty years,” he said, never batting an eyelid.  “We’ll be fighting another year, and then it’ll tak us thirty-nine years more to wind up all the wire!”

Off to my right there was a network of steel strands, and as I gazed at it I saw a small dark object hanging from it and fluttering in the breeze.  I was curious enough to go over, and I picked my way carefully through the maze-like network of wire to see what it might be.  When I came close I saw it was a bit of cloth, and immediately I recognized the tartan of the Black Watch—­the famous Forty-second.  Mud and blood held that bit of cloth fastened to the wire, as if by a cement.  Plainly, it had been torn from a kilt.

I stood for a moment, looking down at that bit of tartan, flapping in the soft summer breeze.  And as I stood I could look out and over the landscape, dotted with a very forest of little wooden crosses, that marked the last resting-place of the men who had charged across this maze of wire and died within it.  They rose, did those rough crosses, like sheathed swords out of the wild, luxurious jungle of grass that had grown up in that blood-drenched soil.  I wondered if the owner of the bit of tartan were still safe or if he lay under one of the crosses that I saw.