I went in through the western doorway.  All along the nave lay a long heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little trodden path over the grass and weeds.  This is all that remained of the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them.  It was all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered how it stood.

In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead, here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a hailstorm in spring.  The aisles still had their roofs over them which those stout old walls held up in spite of all.

Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous.  Perhaps there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:  there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.

I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar.  To my left all was ruin.  To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.  The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened, partly broken.  A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was this that had opened the door.

Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.

As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France.  She seemed to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop’s servant, or the wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws.  I spoke to her.  All Arras, she said, was ruined.  The great cathedral was ruined, her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad houses gazed from forlorn dead windows.  Absolute ruin, she said; but there must be no armistice.  No armistice.  No.  It was necessary that there should be no armistice at all.  No armistice with Germans.

She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.

A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes’ heads on his collar, showed me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five years ago.  It was the very chancel before which I was standing.  To see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower down, under the great heap.  Though one knew there had been an altar there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a cathedral’s interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with which the mind fumbled.