SOLEMN ARRAS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11947, 5 March 1917, Page 4

SOLEMN ARRAS.

STILLNESS, CELLAR LIFE, FASHIONS AND SHELLS, WAR AND WALLFLOWERS. (From FILSON YOUNG.) With the British Army in France. January. Arras is one of the show places of the war, and you might almost say that it has a pride in keeping up appearances. It is within 200') yar<is of the German lines, arid any time they chose to expend the necessary amount oi high explosive they couid lay it us flat as Ypres.

Yet although it is in ruins it still stands in the semblance of a town ; every street is there, paved and clear, with the front wails of the houses standing on oither hand; anyone re turning to it might still find his cwn hail door, and even ring his own bell- It is still Arras. Visitors have wandered through its streets, many curious eyes have looked upon its tragic, dissolution, it has been photographed, drawn, written about endlessly, but nothing can vulgarise it or rob it of its weird and awful solemnity. I spent three hours hi tt io-day—the strangest hours of my life. At its ancient gate I passed from, the busy world of war into a city of a dream. Its stillness was eerie beyond words. There were, no sounds but the whine of the shells far overhead ; my footsteps rang in the- empty streets at high noon like those of some midnight pedestrian in a sleeping town The doors of the houses were all padlocked, as though to guard private things from marauding or inquisitive intrusion; and there through a great hole in the wall, you could see, inster,*;! of a domestic interior, a great heap of 'rubbish and smash—sees shed bedsteads, chairs, masonry, , fireplaces, floors, and doors, all twisted and jumbled together with perhaps a framed picture still hanging high up on a fragment of what was once a bedroom wall, with its veryglass unbroken. A LINGERING ROSE. As I walked on the unearthly wonder of it increased upon me. All is i:s quiet as the grave; yet at any moment the song of the shells in the air may change, to the sudden whistling scream, the deafening explosion and the roar and rattle of failing masonry which advertise the arrival oi one more shell in the stricken town. Curiosity and the spell of the place lead you on through ruined squares where the fountains are -still running, andb y gardens where, in some sheltered corner, a rose is still lingering or wallflowers are pushing on their preparations for the spring. The vaster ruin is in the greater buildings. The Hotel de Ville is an acreage of pulverised stone-heaps: the great cathedral, open to the sky, has still some walls and columns standing, but the nave is a. mountain of jumbled masonry across which it is impossible to climb. And 'the railway station is like nothing so much as a very elaborate toy destroyed and forsaken by an angry child. Grass and weeds grow high between the platforms; the ground is covered with broken glass and'twisted iron and splintered wood; and amid a litter of glass, luggage, labels, tickets, glass, account books, glass, upholstered sm!",T.?. and glass, yon may trace the- reins ins of booking office, waiting-room, buffet, signal box, bookstall, lamp-room, and all the paraphemruin of a. busy and important, railway station.

And through it all, in the deathly silence, you tread gingerly and suspiciously,, your ear on rho alert for the slightest change in the note of the shell-son 2; in the sides. This big railway station is about the loneliest place 1 have found in the war.

Rut as you explore further you find that you ato not- alone. Arras is full of cellars, and n few people who have lost almost everything but life still live in some of them. An old woman put her head up from one as 1 wont by and I wag nearly as startled as if I had seen, a tiger. As I was talking; to her another head appeared from an adjoining cellar. These two women lived sido by side, not in the same roomy cellar, mark you. but each alone in a separate roomy cellar, thu- clinging—good heavens 1— to independence even in this golgotha.

They had been there for more than two years, they had lost everything and everybody, there was no reason why they should go anywhere else, and they were quite cheerful about it; they professed to want for nothing. And they were not the only ones; there is a remnant, living, like them, underground. There is a baker who bakes in a cellar, there are even two butchers; and in their rivalry commerce may be said still to exist in Arras-

Perhaps the most surprising thing in Arras was the sight I had of two girls who suddenly turned out, frpm one arcade of ruins and crossed the empty square towards another. There they were, obviously well-to-do. well turned out, -with n smart and costly simplicity, their hair and feet in perfect daintiness and order, innocently laughing and swinging their chain's and "purses as though they were on a shopping excursion in the Rue do la Paix, and not at all as though they might bo wiped out of sight at any moment.They passed "thus from one Quarter of skeleton houses and obliterating smash to another—from one nothingness to another; and thev will remain, lor me, the chief mystery of Arras. Man and his dwelling-place-—how much of life and of war is included in that association! Here one saw the beautiful awl dignified dwelling-place that centuries had brought to perfection smashed'utterly to pieces; and out there beyond the walls man was going back to the most primitive home of all—a hole scraped out of the earth.