"Play Wagner," some one asked.
A member of our party who had been in Russia said:
"Do you permit German music? In Russia it is forbidden."
The officer replied:
"How stupid! Things which are beautiful remain beautiful," and he played an air from "Tristan" as a shell went screaming overhead.
The young lieutenant, handsome and debonair, turned to me:
"This is fine," he said. "Here we are in the last house in Arras where this scene is possible, and perhaps to-morrow this place will all be gone—perhaps in ten minutes." He laughed and the piano was silenced by the explosion of another shell.
We climbed into our automobiles and hurried out of town along a road in plain sight of the German guns. I thought of what General Foch had said: "We can go through them any time we desire." I got out my military map and looked at the German line, slipping gradually from the plateau of Artois into the plain of Douai—the plain that contains Lens, Douai and Lille and sweeps away across the frontier of Belgium. That was the place to which General Foch referred when he said the Germans "must keep on going away." I turned to an officer beside me in the car. I said: "When the French guns are sweeping that plain it means the end of the Germans in Northern France?" He smiled and nodded, while I offered a silent prayer that on that day I might be permitted by the military authorities to make my fourth visit to Artois, to see the decisive victory of French arms that I believe will take place there under the command of General Foch, and that will help largely to bring this war to a close.