But they had done their work!
Nobody was living in Arras. No one could have lived there. The houses
had been smashed to pieces. The pavements were dust and rubble. But
there was life in the city. Through the ruins our men moved as
ceaselessly and as restlessly as the tenants of an ant hill suddenly
upturned by a plowshare. Soldiers were everywhere, and guns--guns,
guns! For Arras had a new importance now. It was a center for many
roads. Some of the most important supply roads of this sector of the
front converged in Arras.
Trains of ammunition trucks, supply carts and wagons of all sorts,
great trucks laden with jam and meat and flour, all were passing
every moment. There was an incessant din of horses' feet and the
steady crunch--crunch of heavy boots as the soldiers marched through
the rubble and the brickdust. And I knew that all this had gone on
while the town was still under fire. Indeed, even now, an occasional
shell from some huge gun came crashing into the town, and there would
be a new cloud of dust arising to mark its landing, a new collapse of
some weakened wall. Warning signs were everywhere about, bidding all
who saw them to beware of the imminent collapse of some heap of masonry.
I saw what the Germans had left of the stately old Cathedral, and of
the famous Cloth Hall--one of the very finest examples of the guild
halls of medieval times. Goths--Vandals--no, it is unfair to seek
such names for the Germans.
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