I turned and beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to be happening in this incredible war.This man was, I suppose, a native officer of some cavalry force from French north Africa.
He was a handsome dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow-white robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of sheepskin.He was riding one of those little fine lean horses with long tails that I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots were stuck into great silver stirrups.He might have ridden straight out of the Arabian nights.He passed thoughtfully, picking his way delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming into the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction of the smashed-up refinery.
2
About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an effect of waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever experienced.At Arras the situation is almost incredible to the civilian mind.The British hold the town, the Germans hold a northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are just four metres apart.This state of tension has lasted for long months.
Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I suppose there is no advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side.But there is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing.And meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an intermittent fire, the German guns register--I think that is the right term--on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British guns search lovingly for the German batteries.As one walks about the silent streets one hears, "/Bang/---Pheeee---woooo" and then far away "/dump./" One of ours.Then presently back comes "Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/" One of theirs.
Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on./Le Lion d'Arras/, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its valiant sheets, and has done so since the siege began.
The current number of /Le Lion d'Arras/ had to report a local German success.Overnight they had killed a gendarme.
There is to be a public funeral and much ceremony.It is rare for anyone now to get killed; everything is so systematised.
You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various angles, and send them off with the Arras postmark.The town is not without a certain business activity.There is, I am told, a considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; they wear khaki and lead the troglodytic life.They play cards and gossip and sleep in the shadows, and may not walk the streets.I had one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar.Now and then one sees a British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the pavement, mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air.The streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.
The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of litter, but many streets of the town have suffered very little.
Here and there a house has been crushed and one or two have been bisected, the front reduced to a heap of splinters and the back halves of the rooms left so that one sees the bed, the hanging end of the carpet, the clothes cupboard yawning open, the pictures still on the wall.In one place a lamp stands on a chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off completely from the world below....Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/ One would be irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of London, if it were not for those unmeaning explosions.
I went to the station, a dead railway station.A notice-board requested us to walk around the silent square on the outside pavement and not across it.The German sausage balloon had not been up for days; it had probably gone off to the Somme; the Somme was a terrible vortex just then which was sucking away the resources of the whole German line; but still discipline is discipline.The sausage might come peeping up at any moment over the station roof, and so we skirted the square.Arras was fought for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where the porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length of the platform.The station was a fine one of the modern type, with a glass roof whose framework still remains, though the glass powders the floor and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot.
The rails are rails of rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall grasses grow amidst the ballast.The waiting-rooms have suffered from a shell or so, but there are still the sofas of green plush, askew, a little advertisement hung from the wall, the glass smashed.The ticket bureau is as if a giant had scattered a great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on.These tickets are souvenirs too portable to resist.I gave way to that common weakness.
