The street had suffered, not at all on its own account, but because it happened to be in the line of fire of the Town Hall.  It merely received some portion of the blessings which were intended for the Town Hall, but which overshot their mark.  The Town Hall (like the Cathedrals here and at Rheims) had no military interest or value, but it was the finest thing in Arras, the most loved thing, an irreplaceable thing; and therefore the Germans made a set at it, as they made a set at the Cathedrals.  It is just as if, having got an aim on a soldier’s baby, they had started to pick off its hands and feet, saying to the soldier:  “Yield, or we will finish your baby.”  Either the military ratiocination is thus, or the deed is simple lunacy.

When we had walked round to the front of the Town Hall we were able to judge to what extent the beautiful building had monopolised the interest of the Germans.  The Town Hall stands at the head of a magnificent and enormous arcaded square, uniform in architecture, and no doubt dating from the Spanish occupation.  Seeing this square, and its scarcely smaller sister a little further on, you realise that indeed you are in a noble city.  The square had hardly been touched by the bombardment.  There had been no shells to waste on the square while the more precious Town Hall had one stone left upon another.  From the lower end of the square, sheltered from the rain by the arcade, I made a rough sketch of what remains of the Town Hall.  Comparing this sketch with an engraved view taken from exactly the same spot, one can see graphically what had occurred.  A few arches of the ground-floor colonnade had survived in outline.  Of the upper part of the facade nothing was left save a fragment of wall showing two window-holes.  The rest of the facade, and the whole of the roof, was abolished.  The later building attached to the left of the facade had completely disappeared.  The carved masonry of the earlier building to the right of the facade had survived in a state of severe mutilation.  The belfry which, rising immediately behind the Town Hall, was once the highest belfry in France (nearly 250 feet), had vanished.  The stump of it, jagged like the stump of a broken tooth, obstinately persisted, sticking itself up to a level a few feet higher than the former level of the crest of the roof.  The vast ruin was heaped about with refuse.

Arras is not in Germany.  It is in France.  I mention this fact because it is notorious that Germany is engaged in a defensive war, and in a war for the upholding of the highest civilisation.  The Germans came all the way across Belgium, and thus far into France, in order to defend themselves against attack.  They defaced and destroyed all the beauties of Arras, and transformed it into a scene of desolation unsurpassed in France, so that the highest civilisation might remain secure and their own hearths intact.  One wonders what the Germans would have done had they been fighting,