The skies were grey when we reached the banal outskirts of a town where the bourgeoise houses were modern, commonplace, save those which had been ennobled by ruin.  It was Arras, one of those few magic names, eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, intrigue and chivalry; while upon their significance, since the war began, has been superimposed still another, no less eloquent but charged with pathos.  We halted for a moment in the open space before the railroad station, a comparatively new structure of steel and glass, designed on geometrical curves, with an uninspiring, cheaply ornamented front.  It had been, undoubtedly, the pride of the little city.  Yet finding it here had at first something of the effect of the discovery of an office-building—­let us say—­on the site of the Reims Cathedral.  Presently, however, its emptiness, its silence began to have their effects—­these and the rents one began to perceive in the roof.  For it was still the object of the intermittent yet persistent fire of the German artillery.  One began to realize that by these wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre imagination of its provincial designer.  A fine rain had set in before we found the square, and here indeed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction; despite the wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly haunted it.  Although the Hotel de Ville, which had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was razed to the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied yet harmonious facades of Flemish houses made familiar by photographs.  Of some of these the plaster between the carved beams had been shot away, the roofs blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were bared to the sky.  The place was empty in the gathering gloom of the twilight.  The gaiety and warmth of the hut erected in the Public Gardens which houses the British Officers’ Club were a relief.

The experiences of the next day will remain for ever in my memory etched, as it were, in sepia.  My guide was a younger officer who had seen heroic service, and I wondered constantly how his delicate frame had survived in the trenches the constant hardship of such weather as now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains drawn, we faced.  The inevitable, relentless rain of that region had set in again, the rain in which our own soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of a darkness seldom known in America.  The countryside was no longer smiling.  After some two hours of progress we came, in that devastated district near the front, to an expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in primeval slime.  At some distance from the road others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise.  These were the far-famed tanks.  Their commander, or chief mahout—­as I was inclined to call him—­was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often driven