w as we passed beneath a battered arc

ured for all time, is a city still-a City of Desolation. Her streets lie empty and silent, her once pleasant squares are a dreary desolation, her noble buildings,

that my thoughts were gloomy as the day itself? I paused in a street of fair, tall houses, from whose broken windows curtains of lace, of plush, and tapestry flapped mournfully in the

had become of all those for whom this door had been wont to open, where now were the eyes that had looked down from these windows many and many a time-would

n the dimness behind flapping curtains, they peered down through closed jalousies-wraiths of the men and wome

beyond demolished house-fronts; here a table set for dinner, with plates and tarnished cutlery on a dingy cloth that stirred damp and

hair was drawn up to the hearth, with a small table whereon stood a decanter and a half-emptied glass, and an open book whose damp leaves stirred in the wind, now and then, as if touched by phantom fingers. Indeed, more than once I marvelled to see how, amid the awful wreckage of broken floors and tumble

w only unsightly heaps of rubbish, a confusion of broken beams and rafters, amid which divers familiar objects obtrude

and saw before me all that remained of the stately building which for centuries had been the Hotel de Ville, now nothing but a crumbling ruin of n

attle and siege, had fronted the catapults of Rome, heard the fierce shouts of barbarian assailants, known the merciless s

seemingly from beneath my feet, a voice that echoed eerily in that silent Place. Glancing about I beheld a beshawled

hat my time was limited and all I wished to see lay above ground, and from her I learned that some few people yet remained in ruined Arras, who, even as she, lived underground, since every day at irregular intervals the enemy fired into the town haphazard. Only that very morning, she told me, another shell had struck the poor Hotel de Ville, and she pointed to a

mid the desolate ruin of that once busy square, her beshawled head bow

ck street, where, in a shop that apparently sold everything, from pickles to picture postcards, two British soldiers were buying a pair of braces from a smiling, haggard-eyed woman, and being extremely polite about it in cryptic Anglo-French; and here I foregathered with my companions. Our way led us through the railway station, a much-battered ruin, its clock tower half gone, its platforms cracked and splintered, the iron girders of its great, domed roof bent and twisted, and with never a sheet of gla

place with strange echoes, for, being wet and weary and British, they sang cheerily. Packs a-swing, rifles on shoulder, they tramped through sh

he rain fell, wetting the shattered heap of particoloured marble that had been the high altar once. Here and there, half buried in the débris at my feet, I saw fragments of memorial tablets, a battered corona, the twisted remains of a great c

ation posts. But I have seen many ruined churches-usually beautified by Time and hallowed by tradition-that b

es took on an aspect more sinister and forbidding in the half-light. Behind those flapping curtains were pits of gloom full of unimagined terrors whence came unea

ain!" murmur

ery deuce with these broken roofs and things if it blows hard. Going to be a beastly ni

wind-swept ruins, under battered arch, and the dismal city was

ruin-waiting for the great Day; and surely her patience cannot go unrewarded. For since science has proved that nothing can be utterly destroyed, since I for one am convinced that the soul of man throug