The push has left its mark all over Arras. There was desolation before it. But such was its punishment when it was the centre from which we pushed, that destruction has spread into every street. Intensity is the quality of the destruction. And it is still going on. Shell are still screaming in.
The splendid cathedral is an amorphous heap of stone; there are infrequent pillars and girders that have escaped, and stand gaunt among the ruins. The Hôtel de Ville retains but a few arches of its beautiful carved front. Splendid maisons are in ruins. In the streets there are the stone barricades and entaglements of barbed wire. The gare, as busy as the Amiens gare before the war, and as fine, is rent and crumbling. The network of lines under its glass roof is grass-grown. The fine Place before it, where you can envisage the peace traffic in taxi's and pedestrians, is torn by shell, or by fatigues which have uprooted the stone for street barricades.
Most people who see for the first time the desolation of such buildings as the cathedral cry out angrily upon German vandalism, with the implication that it is because they were fine and stately that the cathedral and the Hôtel de Ville were battered. This is not only unjust, but nonsensical. The German has other things to think of than the deliberate destruction of beautiful buildings because they are beautiful. What he has to consider is their height and their potential usefulness as observation-posts. And this is what he does consider, as we would and do consider such features too. Had we been bombarding Arras, it is the tall and beautiful cathedral that we would have shattered first. You may as logically rail against the Germans for smashing down these potential observation-posts as object to the prosecution of the War on Sunday....
The old warning notices persist, and have been put up more plain and frequent: Assembly-Point, indicating the cellars of refuge; warnings against touching unexploded shell; and so forth.
The Town Major, the Railhead Ordnance Officer, the Railway Transport Officer, the Railhead Supply Officer, the Railhead Salvage Officer—all are intensely busy, and all well sandbagged. The Salvage officer is beset by his friends for souvenirs. The R.O.O. is beset by the quartermasters of battered battalions for fresh equipment. The R.S.O. is hunted by the hungry. The R.T.O. is at his wits' end to entrain and detrain men and guns—especially men. The town teems with troops.
The returning refugees trouble none of these officials. They go to the French Mission for directions as to resettling.
As soon as you emerge on the eastern side of Arras you see the line from the rising ground. The captive balloons mark it well; they are so frequent—huge hovering inflations with the tiny observer's basket dangling, and the streaming pennon half-way down the cable to avert collision with the patrolling aircraft. For they must be patrolled well. The Hun has lately the trick of pouncing on them from aloft, shooting the tracer bullet as he dives. The tracer will put the thing in flames in the twinkling of an eye. The observer does not wait if he sees a Hun coming for him. He leaps for it. His parachute harness is always about his shoulders, and his parachute tucked beneath the balloon. But even with the Hun making for him, this leap into space is a fearsome thing. He falls sheer for some seconds before the parachute is wrenched from its place. Then there is that second of horrible uncertainty as to whether she will open. And if there is a hitch, his dive to earth becomes a flash and his breathless body thuds into pulp below. So ended the man who "made" the song "Gilbert the Filbert." So end others, failed by their parachute.... Sometimes combustion is so rapid that the parachute is burnt with the balloon; then he leaps from the death by fire to death of another sort. Nor does a well-released parachute always let you down lightly. If the wind is strong and contrary, you may drift five miles and land 'midst Huns. If the wind is strong and favourable, your pendulic swing beneath the parachute may land you roughly with wounds and bruises. You may be smashed against chimneys, torn by trees, dragged through canals, and haled bleeding up the bank. But if the Lord is with you, you will swing slowly down in the still air and be landed tenderly in a field of clover.
Sometimes balloons get set afire by lightning. If then the parachute is saved, the observer is fortunate indeed. Lightning gives rather less warning to leap than does the flying Hun.
All the country from Arras to the line bears the scars of recent fighting. A great deal of it bears the marks of German occupation; you see this in German Verboten signs and in German canteen notices.