For Arras was a city of beauty⁠—a living expression in stone of all the idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and gracious place. Even then, after a year’s bombardment, some spiritual exhalation of human love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I entered the city and wandered a little in its public gardens before going into its dead heart⁠—the Grande Place⁠—I felt the strange survival. The trees here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down.

Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and slashed, but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went through many long streets and passed long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful in their silence and desolation and ruin.