AMIENS, October, 1915.

In England it is “business as usual”; in France it is “war as usual.”  The English tradesman can assure his customers that with such an “old-established” firm as his not even war can interfere; but France, with war actually on her soil, has gone further and has accepted war as part of her daily life.  She has not merely swallowed, but digested it.  It is like the line in Pinero’s play, where one woman says she cannot go to the opera because of her neuralgia.  Her friend replies:  “You can have neuralgia in my box as well as anywhere else.”  In that spirit France has accepted the war.  The neuralgia may hurt, but she does not take to her bed and groan.  Instead, she smiles cheerfully and goes about her duties ­even sits in her box at the opera.

As we approached the front this was even more evident than in Paris, where signs of war are all but invisible.  Outside of Amiens we met a regiment of Scots with the pipes playing and the cold rain splashing their bare legs.  To watch them we leaned from the car window.  That we should be interested seemed to surprise them; no one else was interested.  A year ago when they passed it was “Roses, roses, all the way” ­or at least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine.  Now, in spite of the skirling bagpipes, no one turned his head; to the French they had become a part of the landscape.

A year ago the roads at every two hundred yards were barricaded.  It was a continual hurdle-race.  Now, except at distances of four or five miles, the barricades have disappeared.  One side of the road is reserved for troops, the other for vehicles.  The vehicles we met ­for the most part two-wheeled hooded carts ­no longer contained peasants flying from dismantled villages.  Instead, they were on the way to market with garden-truck, pigs, and calves.  On the drivers’ seat the peasant whistled cheerily and cracked his whip.  The long lines of London buses, that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and villages of Artois is a “paying guest.”  It is for him the shop-windows are dressed.  The names of the towns are Flemish; the names of the streets are Flemish; the names over the shops are Flemish; but the goods for sale are marmalade, tinned kippers, The Daily Mail, and the Pink ’Un.

“Is it your people who are selling these things?” I asked an English officer.

The question amused him.

“Our people won’t think of it until the war is over,” he said, “but the French are different.

“They are capable, adaptable, and obliging.  If one of our men asks these shopkeepers for anything they haven’t got they don’t say, ’We don’t keep it’; they get him to write down what it is he wants, and send for it.”

It is the better way.  The Frenchman does not say, “War is ruining me”; he makes the war help to support him, and at the same time gives comfort to his ally.

A year ago in the villages the old men stood in disconsolate groups with their hands in their pockets.  Now they are briskly at work.  They are working in the fields, in the vegetable-gardens, helping the Territorials mend the roads.  On every side of them were the evidences of war ­in the fields abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, shelters for fodder and ammunition, hangars for repairing aeroplanes, vast slaughter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the roads endless lines of lorries, hooded ambulances, marching soldiers.

To us those were of vivid interest, but to the French peasant they are in the routine of his existence.  After a year of it war neither greatly distresses nor greatly interests him.  With one hand he fights; with the other he ploughs.

We had made a bet as to which would see the first sign of real war, and the sign of it that won and that gave general satisfaction, even to the man who lost, was a group of German soldiers sweeping the streets of St. Pol.  They were guarded only by one of their own number, and they looked fat, sleek, and contented.  When, on our return from the trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied.  Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a sinecure.

The next sign of war was more thrilling.  It was a race between a French aeroplane and German shrapnel.  To us the bursting shells looked like five little cotton balls.  Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts, has invariably been compared to balls of cotton, and as that is exactly what it looks like, it is again so described.  The balls of cotton did not seem to rise from the earth, but to pop suddenly out of the sky.

A moment later five more cotton balls popped out of the sky.  They were much nearer the aeroplane.  Others followed, leaping after it like the spray of succeeding waves.  But the aeroplane steadily and swiftly conveyed itself out of range and out of sight.

To say where the trenches began and where they ended is difficult.  We were passing through land that had been retrieved from the enemy.  It has been fought for inch by inch, foot by foot.  To win it back thousands of lives had been thrown like dice upon a table.  There were vast stretches of mud, of fields once cultivated, but now scarred with pits, trenches, rusty barbed-wires.  The roads were rivers of clay.  They were lined with dugouts, cellars, and caves.  These burrows in the earth were supported by beams, and suggested a shaft in a disused mine.  They looked like the tunnels to coal-pits.  They were inhabited by a race of French unknown to the boulevards ­men, bearded, deeply tanned, and caked with clay.  Their uniforms were like those of football players on a rainy day at the end of the first half.  We were entering what had been the village of Ablain, and before us rose the famous heights of Mont de Lorette.  To scale these heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling our Palisades or the sheer cliff of Gibraltar.  But they had been scaled, and the side toward us was crawling with French soldiers, climbing to the trenches, descending from the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, ammunition, and fuel for the fires.

A cold rain was falling and had turned the streets of Ablain and all the roads to it into swamps.  In these were islands of bricks and lakes of water of the solidity and color of melted chocolate.  Whatever you touched clung to you.  It was a land of mud, clay, liquid earth.  A cold wind whipped the rain against your face and chilled you to the bone.  All you saw depressed and chilled your spirit.

To the “poilus,” who, in the face of such desolation, joked and laughed with the civilians, you felt you owed an apology, for your automobile was waiting to whisk you back to a warm dinner, electric lights, red wine, and a dry bed.  The men we met were cavemen.  When night came they would sleep in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a muskrat.

They moved in streets of clay two feet across.  They were as far removed from civilization, as in the past they have known it, as though they had been cast adrift upon an island of liquid mud.  Wherever they looked was desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jumbles of bricks, tunnels in mud, caves in mud, graves in mud.

In other wars the “front” was something almost human.  It advanced, wavered, and withdrew.  At a single bugle-call it was electrified.  It remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley.  In comparison, this trench work did not suggest war.  Rather it reminded you of a mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the cavemen paid to them, the reports of their “seventy-fives” and the “Jack Johnsons” of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that for three hundred miles like a miniature canal is cut across France.  Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls, so close that we brushed one with each elbow.  By looking up we could see the black, leaden sky.  Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station.  Behind us was the winding entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all millions of fighting men see of it ­wet walls of clay as narrow as a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy is shooting snowballs.

In northern France there are many buried towns and villages.  They are buried in their own cellars.  Arras is still uninterred.  She is the corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German shells are trying to dig her grave.  They were at it yesterday when we visited Arras, and this morning they will be hammering her again.

Seven centuries before this war Arras was famous for her tapestries, so famous that in England a piece of tapestry was called an arras.  Now she has given her name to a battle ­to different battles ­that began with the great bombardment of October a year ago, and each day since then have continued.  On one single day, June 26, the Germans threw into the city shells in all sizes, from three to sixteen inches, and to the number of ten thousand.  That was about one for each house.

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned.  The army feeds them, and in response they have opened shops that the shells have not already opened, and supply the soldiers with tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit and vegetables.  In the deserted city these civilians form an inconspicuous element.  You can walk for great distances and see none of them.  When they do appear in the empty streets they are like ghosts.  Every day the shells change one or two of them into real ghosts.  But the others still stay on.  With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks, and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathedral, they know no other home.

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a sudden change of temperature.  It was actual and menacing.  Every corner seemed to threaten an ambush.  Our voices echoed so loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower tones.  The tap of the captain’s walking-stick resounded like the blow of a hammer.  The emptiness and stillness was like that of a vast cemetery, and the grass that had grown through the paving-stones deadened the sound of our steps.  This silence was broken only by the barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the aeroplanes.  In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.

In the streets were shell holes that had been recently filled and covered over with bricks and fresh earth.  It was like walking upon newly made graves.  On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact.  These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow.  Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open.  They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.

In one house four stories had been torn away, leaving only the attic sheltered by the peaked roof.  To that height no one could climb, and exposed to view were the collection of trunks and boxes familiar to all attics.  As a warning against rough handling, one of these, a woman’s hat-box, had been marked “Fragile.”  Secure and serene, it smiled down sixty feet upon the mass of iron and bricks it had survived.

Of another house the roof only remained; from under it the rest of the building had been shot away.  It was as though after a soldier had been blown to pieces, his helmet still hung suspended in mid-air.

In other streets it was the front that was intact, but when our captain opened the street door we faced a cellar.  Nothing beside remained.  Or else we stepped upon creaky floors that sagged, through rooms swept by the iron brooms into vast dust heaps.  From these protruded wounded furniture ­the leg of a table, the broken arm of a chair, a headless statue.

 “Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of
 the building had been shot away.”]

From the debris we picked the many little heirlooms, souvenirs, possessions that make a home.  Photographs with written inscriptions, post-cards bearing good wishes, ornaments for the centre-table, ornaments for the person, images of the church, all crushed, broken, and stained.  Many shop-windows were still dressed invitingly as they were when the shell burst, but beyond the goods exposed for sale was only a deep hole.

The pure deviltry of a shell no one can explain.  Nor why it spares a looking-glass and wrecks a wall that has been standing since the twelfth century.

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing hundreds of tons had fallen, and directly beneath where it had been hung an enormous glass chandelier untouched.  A shell loves a shining mark.  To what is most beautiful it is most cruel.  The Hotel de Ville, which was counted among the most presentable in the north of France, that once rose in seven arches in the style of the Renaissance, the shells marked for their own.

And all the houses approaching it from the German side they destroyed.  Not even those who once lived in them could say where they stood.  There is left only a mess of bricks, tiles, and plaster.  They suggest the homes of human beings as little as does a brickyard.

We visited what had been the headquarters of General de Wignacourt.  They were in the garden of a house that opened upon one of the principal thoroughfares, and the floor level was twelve feet under the level of the flower-beds.  To this subterranean office there are two entrances, one through the cellar of the house, the other down steps from the garden.  The steps were beams the size of a railroad-tie.  Had they not been whitewashed they would look like the shaft leading to a coal-pit.

A soldier who was an artist in plaster had decorated the entrance to the shaft with an ornamental façade worthy of any public building.  Here, secure from the falling walls and explosive shells, the general by telephone directed his attack.  The place was as dry, as clean, and as compact as the admiral’s quarters on a ship of war.  The switchboard connected with batteries buried from sight in every part of the unburied city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook was preparing a most appetizing luncheon.

 The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras cathedral was
 destroyed by shells, and the chandelier not touched.]

Above us was three yards of cement, rafters, and earth, and crowning them grass and flowers.  When the owner of the house returns he will find this addition to his residence an excellent refuge from burglars or creditors.

Personally we were glad to escape into the open street.  Between being hit by a shell and buried under twelve feet of cement the choice was difficult.

We lunched in a charming house, where the table was spread in the front hall.  The bed of the officer temporarily occupying the house also was spread in the hall, and we were curious to know, but too proud to ask, why he limited himself to such narrow quarters.  Our captain rewarded our reticence.  He threw back the heavy curtain that concealed the rest of the house, and showed us that there was no house.  It had been deftly removed by a shell.

The owner of the house had run away, but before he fled, fearing the Germans might enter Arras and take his money, he had withdrawn it and hidden it in his garden.  The money amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  He placed it in a lead box, soldered up the opening, and buried the box under a tree.  Then he went away and carelessly forgot which tree.

During a lull in the bombardment, he returned, and until two o’clock in the morning dug frantically for his buried treasure.  The soldier who guarded the house told me the difference in the way the soldiers dig a trench and the way our absent host dug for his lost money was greatly marked.  I found the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel.  It was the exact size of a suitcase.  As none of us knows when he may not have to bury a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it is a fact worth remembering.  Any ordinary suitcase will do.  The soldier and I examined the leaden box carefully.  But the owner had not overlooked anything.

When we reached the ruins of the cathedral, we did not need darkness and falling rain to depress us further, or to make the scene more desolate.  One lacking in all reverence would have been shocked.  The wanton waste, the senseless brutality in such destruction would have moved a statue.  Walls as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been blown into powdered chalk.  There were great breaches in them through which you could drive an omnibus.  In one place the stone roof and supporting arches had fallen, and upon the floor, where for two hundred years the people of Arras had knelt in prayer, was a mighty barricade of stone blocks, twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs, torn vestments, shattered glass.  Exposed to the elements, the chapels were open to the sky.  The rain fell on sacred emblems of the Holy Family, the saints, and apostles.  Upon the altars the dust of the crushed walls lay inches deep.

The destruction is too great for present repair.  They can fill the excavations in the streets and board up the shattered show-windows, but the cathedral is too vast, the destruction of it too nearly complete.  The sacrilege must stand.  Until the war is over, until Arras is free from shells, the ruins must remain uncared for and uncovered.  And the cathedral, by those who once came to it for help and guidance, will be deserted.

But not entirely deserted.  The pigeons that built their nests under the eaves have descended to the empty chapels, and in swift, graceful circles sweep under the ruined arches.  Above the dripping of the rain, and the surly booming of the cannon, their contented cooing was the only sound of comfort.  It seemed to hold out a promise for the better days of peace.