It was a long, windy, dusty drive to Arras.  The straight, worn roads of flinty chalk passed for many miles Arras through country where there was no unmilitary activity save that of the crops pushing themselves up.  Everything was dedicated to the war.  Only at one dirty little industrial town did we see a large crowd of men waiting after lunch to go into a factory.  These male civilians had a very odd appearance; it was as though they had been left out of the war by accident, or by some surprising benevolence.  One thought first, “There must be some mistake here.”  But there was probably no mistake.  These men were doubtless in the immense machine.

After we had traversed a more attractive agricultural town, with a town hall whose architecture showed that Flanders was not very far off, the soil changed and the country grew more sylvan and delectable.  And the sun shone hotly.  Camps alternated with orchards, and cows roamed in the camps and also in the orchards.  And among the trees could be seen the blue draperies of women at work.  Then the wires of the field-telephones and telegraphs on their elegantly slim bamboos were running alongside us.  And once or twice, roughly painted on a bit of bare wood, we saw the sign:  “Vers le Front.”  Why any sign should be necessary for such a destination I could not imagine.  But perhaps humour had entered into the matter.  At length we perceived Arras in the distance, and at a few kilometres it looked rather like itself:  it might have been a living city.

When, however, you actually reach Arras you cannot be deceived for an instant as to what has happened to the place.  It offers none of the transient illusion of Rheims.  The first street you see is a desolation, empty and sinister.  Grimy curtains bulge out at smashed windows.  Everywhere the damage of shells is visible.  The roadway and the pavements are littered with bits of homes.  Grass flourishes among the bits.  You proceed a little further to a large, circular place, once imposing.  Every house in it presents the same blighted aspect.  There is no urban stir.  But in the brief intervals of the deafening cannonade can be heard one sound—­blinds and curtains fluttering against empty window-frames and perhaps the idle, faint banging of a loose shutter.  Not even a cat walks.  We are alone, we and the small group of Staff officers who are acting as our hosts.  We feel like thieves, like desecrators, impiously prying.  At the other side of the place a shell has dropped before a house and sliced away all its front.  On the ground floor is the drawing-room.  Above that is the bedroom, with the bed made and the white linen smoothly showing.  The marvel is that the bed, with all the other furniture, does not slide down the sloping floor into the street.  But everything remains moveless and placid.  The bedroom is like a show.  It might be the bedroom of some famous man exposed to worshipping tourists at sixpence a head.  A few chairs have fallen out of the house, and they lie topsy-turvy in the street amid the debris; no one has thought to touch them.  In all directions thoroughfares branch forth, silent, grass-grown, and ruined.