War's Dark Frame/The Mad Activity of a Dead City
CHAPTER XVII
THE MAD ACTIVITY OF A DEAD CITY
THE next morning was dull and depressing and as cold as early winter. As one does out there, we studied the direction of the wind first of all, and inspected our gas masks. We fancied that with less sun the German cannons might bark less viciously, but as we drove on, huddled in our coats, the clouds promised to break, Williams left us for a moment at a division headquarters. No officers lounged there. The streets were nearly empty of uniforms. Williams came out, looking as if he had heard something unexpected.
"The Huns are strafing the main road," he said to the driver.
"Go the other way."
Outside the village a Canadian Highlander stopped us and examined our passes. He seemed very particular. He had an appearance of wondering what the deuce we wanted inside the lines that morning
Just beyond we left the main road and twisted through country lanes, while out of the morbid, threatening morning was born the hateful gun mutter. The foreign office man and I clutched at the trivial. We talked of automobiles and fishing and hunting, but always we were conscious of the sinister and growing chorus. A big gun crouched at the roadside. It would have been good to hear it shout back. Sombre and undisturbed, a Hindoo orderly sat his horse in a field.
"Like a graven image," the foreign office man said.
The increasing roar discouraged talking. We tore past and entered the outskirts of a town. The streets were deserted. Holes gaped in the house walls. Doors were pock-marked, windows mostly gone. A popping noise from the front of our car, not unlike the explosion of a shrapnel shell, and under the circumstances about as discouraging, told us that a tire had gone. The driver sent a startled glance at Williams.
"Annoying!" the foreign office man said.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Outskirts of Arras," Williams snapped.
He sprang out. At such a moment he was sheer efficiency. Most assuredly he didn't want us to get strafed.
"Pile out," he ordered, "and stand close to the wall. “No, no," he cried to the Japanese in the other car. "Not you."
He directed them to remain in the car while their driver backed them between two house walls. The two chauffeurs commenced to change the wheel with frantic haste. A military policeman appeared from some hiding place and walked briskly up.
"It's a bad place for that, sir, this morning."
Things seem pretty warm in here this morning," Williams said.
The military policeman waved his stick.
"Just had a piece of shell through my window, sir. Listen for yourself."
The foreign office man and I lighted cigarettes.
About our misgivings we draped a vast indifference.
"No comfort smoking in the cars in this wind," he said.
Williams moved about close to the wall restlessly.
"What's the best way in?" he asked the policeman.
The policeman pointed down the deserted street, half blocked by rubbish here and there.
"Five blocks straight. Turn to your right at a busted lamp-post marked roo dulla hop-pittle."
One asks the route so on an ordinary motor trip.
The military policeman had done his duty. After warning us he didn't linger. The drivers sprang erect. The jack rattled down. I've never seen a wheel changed so quickly. Racing drivers couldn't be more agile. At a nod from Williams we got in again. We threaded through a dead city, crowded with a noise that gave the lie to its apparent dissolution. The quality of the unnatural ride increased. It shared the incredibility of an hallucination, which, nevertheless, possesses a momentary and terrible reality.
We faced ruins that gaped back at us. At a turning the facade of a hospital had suffered rather more than anything in its vicinity. Its breached and riddled walls had an air of surprise and indignation. Farther on, a bed on the third floor of a house, whose front was gone, hung over an abyss. The bed clothes were tumbled. Pictures, awry, still clung to the walls. A bottle of wine remained upright on a shelf.
“That couldn't have happened long ago," the foreign office man said.
"Every time I come in," Williams answered, some ruin has been ruined a little more. Not a very prosperous looking town now, is it?"
I had seen Messina after the earthquake. Its disaster was scarcely comparable with this man-made one. And in Messina there had been many women weeping over ruins that were sepulchres. This was sadder, because for a long time there was no one. The emptiness pervaded everything. It was more shocking than the reverberations of many guns.
We entered a street that was once, I suppose, the pride of Arras. A grass plot in the middle, lined with trees, reminded me of Park Avenue in New York. We drew up. On our side was a high garden wall. On the other, beyond the grass and the trees and the roadway, was an old French barracks, torn to pieces.
"I'm going to take one of the cars and drive to the provost marshal's," Williams said. "I want to find out what we'd better do now we're here. While I'm gone don't move from under the trees. It's the safest place for you."
He was off. One of the Japanese wanted to know if it was dangerous. The driver of the other car, who had joined us by the fence, laughed above the cracking roar. He stooped and commenced to pick from the grass great, jagged pieces of shell casing. He offered them for the Japanese's inspection.
"Sounds like a gigantic fireworks exhibition," the foreign office man mused.
The sun now and then struggled from behind the clouds, but always the atmosphere was dun, and abnormal, and frightening. A sifting dust coloured it. “Maybe the end of the world would look something like this."
Williams dashed back, a strained and hurried figure in the middle of the rear seat. He had grown confidential and he told me now that the provost had had a shell through his building.
“We might as well walk about," he said. “It's as safe as hanging around here."
"What time do the Germans lunch to-day?"
He looked at his watch. That was evidently of real concern to him.
"I take back what I said about fireworks," the foreign office man cut in. "This isn't the least like fireworks."
Nor was it, for there were detonations louder than the reports of cannon, from the neighbouring streets, and scattered crashes like the crumbling of walls where shells had exploded. There was something wanton about this bombardment of a dead city.
Breathing with distaste the strange, repellant atmosphere, we hurried across a market place whose empty shelters of corrugated iron were half tumbled down. Two officers came swinging by, sticks in their hands, their helmets low on their foreheads. They didn't talk. They moved with smooth haste. The striking of their feet against the paving was inaudible because of the turmoil. They were like figures seen in a dream.
All the houses were skeletons from which the flesh had been rabidly torn.
We glanced down a narrow street, arrested by the sight of two women emerging from a cellar beneath a heap of ruins. One of them carried two chickens, nicely browned. The other had a tin of fried potatoes. A group of military police. men leaning against the opposite wall moved languidly forward and took the appetizing food. They smiled and the women smiled, but as far as we could tell no one spoke. The entire transaction had an air of good-natured stealth.
"Women in Arras!" we cried.
Williams nodded.
A few have stayed. It's orders during a bombardment for every one to remain in the cellars."
“The cooks ought to have decorations," some one said.
“They wouldn't think so," Williams answered. “The French are hard to scare, and they love their homes. Last time I was in here I saw a French soldier. I asked him what in the world he was doing. Said as calmly as you please that he was home on his first permission since the beginning of the war. Fancy that! Taking your vacation from hades in the same climate. You bet the Boches couldn't interfere with his coming home, even if there was only a cellar left. But —"
And Williams laughed and pointed.
"He didn't come on the chemin-de-fer."
Across a broad, semi-circular plaza arose the wrecked station. Following Williams' lead, we sidled around the curve, and slipped in through a doorway. Grass grew through shattered floor boards, Rain had come in and mill-dewed the splintered benches and ticket booths. In a doorless closet a girl's summer cloak hung. There was a card attached to one of the buttons. Williams fingered it, but in the course of two years the writing had become undccipherable.
Must have been warm that August day she came through here," he mused. Maybe on the last train, fleeing from the Huns. Couldn't have known they were so close or she wouldn't have left her coat. Hope she didn't get strafed if she came back for it."
Like the cathedral at Rheims, the hall was filled with sombre and unthinkable memories.
We picked up some tickets scattered near by on the floor.
"Arras to Douai, par Vitry-en-Artois," they read.
"A short trip," I began, " straight across the trenches. When you English take it —" "The war," Williams broke in, "will be getting on Kaiser Bill's nerves, don't you think?"
Something was clearly on Williams' nerves. He hurried us through and gave us only a moment to glance at the broken girders and the twisted rails in the train shed. Among the splinters of the platforms where crowds had thronged eagerly the long grass waved with a slow melancholy.
"It's not very far," he reminded us, "to the Hun trenches, and they have a nasty habit of dropping whiz-bangs in here. There's no bomb proof. Let's go."
We had scarcely reached the shelter of streets lined with looted shops when a soldier came running up and spoke to Williams. He turned with another of those confidences that made you wonder why you had ever come to see war.
"What I was afraid of. The Huns are strafing the station—dropping whiz-bangs in from the trenches."
Probably the German observers had seen us leave. It was the luck of war that they hadn't caught us going in.
We climbed a small mountain of stones and beams at the end of the street and emerged into the Petit Place, a short time ago one of the finest examples of Spanish architecture in Europe. Opposite us the Hotel de Ville raised a few sec tions of interior walls and the stump of its tower, white, formless, ghostly.
"I was in Arras a few weeks before the war began," Williams said. "Had to change trains, and was just too short of time to run down and see this place. Isn't much to look at now, is it?"
Of the old Spanish houses several were completely down. Others retained just enough form to expose the brutality of their wounds. With a sense of sheer gratitude we followed Williams down stone steps into the cellar of one of these. The bombardment was a trifle muffled here. An elderly French woman and her pretty daughter greeted us.
"You're not afraid to stay?" I asked.
The girl tossed her head. The woman laughed. She indicated a cook stove, a table, a bed, a rough counter, half a dozen chairs.
"They've driven us downstairs, but why should we be driven from our home and our business? We are quite comfortable, and we do a little trade with soldiers. Monsieur has seen Arras during the bombardment. Perhaps he would like to see what it was like before. An album artistique might interest monsieur."
She smiled at my bewilderment, fetching a tastefully made up blue book with silk cords and tassels. It was impossible not to buy the thing, a collection of photographs taken, many of them, at grave risk, and sold under a risk nearly as great to the Tommies to send home to their families.
And you've been doing this—living like this since the beginning of the war?"
"But certainly. Through that door I saw the first bombardment of the Little Place. I saw the shells bring the great tower of the Hotel de Ville crashing down. That was cruel. It was the glory of Arras. When it fell I thought of the judgment day."
"You mcan you didn't barricade that door?"
Why? Because the shells came from behind us. If they exploded too close the fragments were likely to fly on towards the centre of the square. Besides —"
With an air of secrecy she opened a door on a flight of stairs leading downwards. You see there is another cellar. Come."
She lighted a candle and led the way down for many steps. The vaulting was ancient. We found ourselves in a labyrinth. Corridors led in all directions. The walls were of a soft limestone. The stone, one guessed, for the Hotel de Ville and many other buildings had been quarried here. B there were fresh breaks, and some. times the corridors were partly blocked.
"The shock of the shells brings pieces tumbling down," the woman said. “That's why we find the upper cellar more comfortable after all. Wouldn't we be more comfortable there now?"
We agreed. As we went up she told us how Arras was honey-combed with these cellars. We left her with a real regret for the strange light and the racket outside. We reached the vicinity of the cathedral over a hill of rubbish.
"Palladian," the foreign office man said.
The stark remnants of the cathedral, indeed, were more impressive than the untouched building—a bad example of the late Renaissance—could have been. Its size must have been enormous.
"Usually it's all right to go in," Williams said, "but I wouldn't advise it to-day. Do as you please, but if one of those walls should fall —"
We didn't argue the point. We had learned to believe in Williams' judgment. He glanced continuously at his watch as we went on. We knew he was trusting to the luncheon hour to give us an opportunity to slip out of Arras in comparative safety. By the time we had returned to the market place, in fact, the roar had receded, and the explosions of shells were less frequent. The drivers seemed glad to see us. So we left, dodging new holes and obstructions, casting quick glances at the driftwood of that morning's straf
ing-torn shell screens, split trees, a twisted bicycle, scattered heaps of stones. We thanked heaven for the German appetite. We prayed it would persist for some minutes longer.