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.