In the north transept a 325-mm. shell has knocked a clean hole through which a mastodon might wriggle.  Just opposite this transept, amid universal wreckage, a cafe is miraculously preserved.  Its glass, mugs, counters, chairs, and ornaments are all there, covered with white dust, exactly as they were left one night.  You could put your hand through a window aperture and pick up a glass.  Close by, the lovely rafter-work of an old house is exposed, and, within, a beam has fallen from the roof to the ground.  This beam is burning.  The flames are industriously eating away at it, like a tiger gnawing in tranquil content at its prey which it has dragged to a place of concealment.  There are other fires in Arras, and have been for some days.  But what are you to do?  A step further on is a greengrocer’s shop, open and doing business.

We gradually circled round the Cathedral until we arrived at the Town Hall, built in the sixteenth century, very carefully restored in the nineteenth, and knocked to pieces in the twentieth.  We approached it from the back, and could not immediately perceive what had happened to it, for later erections have clustered round it, and some of these still existed in their main outlines.  In a great courtyard stood an automobile, which certainly had not moved for months.  It was a wreck, overgrown with rust and pustules.  This automobile well symbolised the desolation, open and concealed, by which it was surrounded.  A touchingly forlorn thing, dead and deaf to the never-ceasing, ever-reverberating chorus of the guns!

To the right of the Town Hall, looking at it from the rear, we saw a curving double row of mounds of brick, stone, and refuse.  Understand:  these had no resemblance to houses; they had no resemblance to anything whatever except mounds of brick, stone, and refuse.  The sight of them acutely tickled my curiosity.  “What is this?”

“It is the principal street in Arras.”  The mind could picture it at once—­ one of those narrow, winding streets which in ancient cities perpetuate the most ancient habits of the citizens, maintaining their commercial pre-eminence in the face of all town-planning; a street leading to the Town Hall; a dark street full of jewellers’ shops and ornamented women and correctness and the triumph of correctness; a street of the “best” shops, of high rents, of famous names, of picturesque signs; a street where the wheels of traffic were continually interlocking, but a street which would not, under any consideration, have widened itself by a single foot, because its narrowness was part of its prestige.  Well, German gunnery has brought that street to an end past all resuscitation.  It may be rebuilt—­ it will never be the same street.

“What’s the name of the street?” I asked.

None of the officers in the party could recall the name of the principal business street in Arras, and there was no citizen within hail.  The very name had gone, like the forms of the houses.  I have since searched for it in guides, encyclopaedias, and plans; but it has escaped me—­withdrawn and lost, for me, in the depths of history.