ARRAS AFTER THE PUSH

The traffic on the cobbled road to Arras raises a dust—although it is cobbled. The spring green of the elms that line it is overcast with the pallor of a man under the anÆsthetic. The fresh breeze raises a dust that sometimes stops a motor cyclist; sometimes it is the multiplicity of traffic that stops him. His face and hair are as dust-pallid as the trees.

The push is over. The traffic in and out is as heavy as it could be. There is no intermission in it. It files past the road control in a procession in which there are no intervals.

The ingoing traffic is not all military. Incongruously among the lorries lumber civilian carts stuffed with all the chattels of returning refugees. One knows not whether it is more pathetic to see these forlorn French families returning to the desolation of their homes or flying from it. They will lumber down the flagged streets lined with houses, rent and torn and overthrown, that were once the homes of their friends and the shops of their dealers. Here at one time they promenaded in the quiet Sabbath afternoon sunshine. Now the pavement is torn with shell-holes and the street is ditched with them and defaced with half-wrecked barriers. The Grand Place, where once they congregated for chat in the summer twilight, or sunned themselves in the winter, is choked with supplies and sweating troops. The troops are billeted in the half-wrecked houses of every street. The refugees will drive through to the place of their old homes and see the spring greening the trenches which zigzag through their old gardens, and clothing the splintered trees in their old orchards. This is worse than fleeing from the wrath of shell to come. But they love their town so intensely that they rattle through the city gate with an aspect of melancholy satisfaction.

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.

The dwellings of the eastern suburbs lie in ruined heaps of brick; there may be the ground-plan indicated by the low, rugged remnant of wall. A jagged house-end may still lean there forlornly, with the branches of the springing trees thrusting through its cracks and the spring vines trailing through its shell-rents. With the spring upon it, the whole landscape is more pathetic than in the bareness of winter. This ruination sorted better with leafless boughs and frozen ground. The sweet lush grass smiling in the interstices of ruin is hard to look on. The slender poplar aspiring with tapering grace above the red and grey wreckage is the more beautiful thereby, but the wreckage is more hideously pathetic. It would break your heart to see the pear-tree blossoming blithely in the rubble-strewn area that was once its orchard. The refugee who returns will know (or perhaps he will not) that in place of this dÉbris of crunched brick, splintered beam, twisted iron, convulsed barbed wire, strewn about the trenches and shell-holes of his property, was once the ordered quietness of orchard and garden—his ranks of pear and apple, trim paths, shrubberies, the gay splashes of flower-colour and carpeted softness of lawn. This will wring his heart more than the loss of furniture. Though much of his furniture was heirloom, this little orchard and garden were the fruit of his own twenty years of loving nurture. This little area he idealised as his farmed estate, his stately parc. Here on Sabbath evenings he walked down the shrubbed paths with his wife and children, after returning from the weekly promenade of the streets of Arras. His children romped on the lawn since they could crawl. Now not only is it gone, but its associations too—torn by shell, defiled by trenches, desecrated by the cruel contortions of rusting wire. The zigzagged clay parapet winds about his well-beloved plots; the ruins of a machine-gun emplacement lie about the remnant of his summer-house; beef-tins, jam-tins, and undischarged hand-grenades, are strewn beneath his splintered shade-trees. The old sweet orchard air is defiled by the sickening, indefinable stink of a deserted trench; the broken sandbags lie greening about the turf.

This is all ruin of a sort more or less inevitable. Follow the road winding down the valley beyond the suburb, and you will see the foul, deliberate ruin of whole avenues of trees that once lined the route. You know how these stately elm and beech met overhead for leagues along the pleasant roads of France; there they lie now naked in the turf by the road-side, untimely cut down by the steam-saw of the Hun. He traversed the whole length of this road with that admirable German thoroughness of his and felled them all across it to bar our progress. The shattering of Arras Cathedral was necessary; this is mere expediency, and near to wantonness. Forty years of stately growth lie there gaunt and sapless. Soon you will see the tender tufts of green spring from the smooth-cut stump. They have been beautifully cut: German machinery is unimpeachably efficient. McAndrew's song of steam is the noble celebration of the triumph of human mechanical genius; these bleeding stumps are the monument that will testify for half a century to the blasphemous misapplication of German mechanical skill. The steam-saw must have worked beautifully. You can conceive the German N.C.O. in charge of it standing by emitting approval as the stately beech crashed across the road from the fine, smooth cut—"SchÖn!... SchÖn!" ...

This will hurt the French more than other peoples think; they are so proud of their forestry; they plant with such considerate foresight into the pleasure that posterity will have in their trees—with such prevision as to the arrangement of plantations and as to the tout ensemble of the avenue and the forÊt when the trees shall be mature. A tree is nothing until you have personified it: the French personify the trees of their private plantations; they are like members of the famille. And such is the State care of forestry that you almost believe it has personified the State plantations in a collective sort of way, regarding them almost as a branch of society or of the nation. The national care of trees is with them a thing analogous to the administration of orphanages. The German will have reckonings to make after the War for maimed and murdered trees and for annihilated orchards, as well as for fallen and deformed Frenchmen....

After the trenches of Anzac, you are overwhelmed in France with the pathos of the contiguity of trench with dwelling. It is less unnatural that the unpeopled wilderness of Anzac should be torn by shell and scarred by trench-line. In France there is a piteous incongruity in the intimacy of warfare with domesticity. The village that has been the stronghold is shattered beyond all reviving; and inevitably the villages of the fighting area have been used as a fleeting shelter from the fierceness of the tempest of shell. L'Église is a roofless ruin. L'HÔtel de Ville and la Marie are amorphous masses of jagged and crumpled wall. The trenches traverse the street and the garden and the cour de maison. The tiny rivulet on the outskirts of the village has been hailed as a sort of ready-made trench and hastily squared and fire-stepped. The farm is pocked with shell-holes; the farmhouse is notoriously open to the heavens and gaping about the estate through its rent walls. On Anzac only the chalk ridges were scored and the stunted, uncertain growth uprooted; there were not even trees to maim. Here the cellars are natural dug-outs in the trench-wall; the maison is the billet for the reserve battalion; the communication trench ploughs rudely through the quiet cobbled street. The desecrating contrast cries from the ground at every turn. The village that used to sleep in the sun with its pleasant crops about it now sleeps in ashes and ruination for ever. The battle-lines of Turkey will be effaced and overgrown by the seasons, but that which was a village in France will never more know the voices of little children again in its streets, because it has no streets, and because new villages will be built rather than this hideousness overturned and effaced and built-upon afresh.

If you walk east an hour from Arras you'll get near enough to Tilloy to see the shelling of our line. Again Anzac is superseded. Anzac never saw shell of this size (except from the monitors that bombarded from the sea); nor did Anzac know bombardment of this intensity, except in isolated spurts. Here the normal bombardment is intense. This is mere routine; but it's as fierce as preceded any attack on Gallipoli. What chance has the individual when modern artillery is at work? Yet the chance of death cannot be greater than say, one in four; otherwise there would be no men left. The rank of balloons is spotting; the 'planes are patrolling them; other 'planes are circling over our batteries—spotting; others are going in squadron over the line—"on some stunt," as Tommy puts it. Our own guns are speaking all about, so loud that the noise of crowding transport is altogether drowned: by them, and by the crack of the German bursts and by the shell-scream. The transport on this road is not mechanical; we are too near the line for that.

A German 'plane is being "archied" to the north, and there is a barrage of "archies" being put up behind it to give our 'planes time to rise to attack it. Two of them are climbing up to it now over our heads. They climb very steep. They are very fast 'planes. They are on the level of the Hun very quickly: they are above it. The barrage has ceased, because the Hun is trying to risk running through rather than waiting to fight two Nieuports. But one has intercepted him and is coming for him in the direction of the line. The other is diving on him from above. There is the spasmodic rattle of Lewis guns. The Hun is firing thick on the man rushing him. He has done it, too; for suddenly our man swerves and banks in a way that is plainly involuntary, and then begins to fall, banking irregularly. Suddenly the flames begin to spurt from her body. As suddenly she seems to regain control and dives steep for earth, flames streaming from the wings and in a comet-tail behind. She tears down at a horrible angle. Then you know in a moment that this is not steering, but a nose-dive to death, and that it is controlled by no pilot. We can hear the roar of flame. She is nearer to us, making for us. She crashes horribly a hundred yards away and roars and crackles. The delicate wings and body are gone long before we reach her; there is only a quiet smouldering amongst the cracked and twisted frame, and the sickening smell of burnt flesh and of oil-fumes.

The Hun has escaped—at least, we fear he will escape. He and our other man are small specks in the blue above the German line. They cannot "archie" them together. Our man turns, and grows. Then he gets it—the deadly white puffs on every hand of him. But he comes through, and proceeds to patrol.