“You see the strong fortress I have!” says the Commanding Officer with genial sarcasm.  “You notice its high military value.  It is open at every end.  You can walk into it as easily as into a windmill.  And yet they bombard it.  Yesterday they fired twenty projectiles a minute for an hour into the town.  A performance absolutely useless!  Simple destruction!  But they are like that!”

So we went forward further into the city, and saw sights still stranger.  Of one house nothing but the roof was left, the roof made a triumphal arch.  Everywhere potted plants, boxed against walls or suspended from window-frames, were freshly blooming.  All the streets were covered with powdered glass.  In many streets telegraph and telephone wires hung in thick festoons like abandoned webs of spiders, or curled themselves round the feet; continually one had to be extricating oneself from them.  Continually came the hollow sound of things falling and slipping within the smashed interiors behind the facades.  And then came the sound of a baby crying.  For this city is not, after all, uninhabited.  We saw a woman coming out of her house and carefully locking the door behind her.  Was she locking it against shells, or against burglars?  Observe those pipes rising through gratings in the pavement, and blue smoke issuing therefrom.  Those pipes are the outward sign that such inhabitants as remain have transformed their cellars into drawing-rooms and bedrooms.  We descended into one such home.  The real drawing-room, on the ground-floor, had been invaded by a shell.  In that apartment richly-carved furniture was mixed up with pieces of wall and pieces of curtain under a thick layer of white dust.  But this underground home, with its arched roof and aspect of extreme solidity, was tidy and very snugly complete in all its arrangements, and the dark entrance to it well protected against the hazards of bombardment.

“Nevertheless,” said the master of the home, “a 210-mm. shell would penetrate everything.  It would be the end.”

He threw up his hands with a nonchalant gesture.  He was a fatalist worthy of his city, which is now being besieged and ruined not for the first time.  The Vandals (I mean the original Vandals) laid waste Arras again and again.  Then the Franks took it.  Then, in the ninth century, the Normans ravaged it; and then Charles the Simple; and then Lothair; and then Hugh Capet.  In the fifteenth century Charles VI. besieged it for seven weeks, and did not take it.  Under Louis XI. it was atrociously outraged.  It revolted, and was retaken by assault, its walls razed, its citizens expatriated, and its name changed.