The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the church of St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins--great blocks of masonry hurled from its dome and buttresses amidst a mass of broken glass. Inside there is a tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos among the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the great organ have been flung out of their framework, but curiously the side altars, with the figures of apostles and saints, and the central figure of the Sacred Heart, are hardly touched, and stand unscathed amidst this great destruction. There is nothing new in all this. For three years I have been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it has the grim interest of recent history, and Armentières is the scene of a tragedy to its civilian population which makes one's heart ache with a new revolt against this monstrous cruelty of war upon the innocent and the helpless. It was easy to see what had happened during those days and nights of terror some weeks ago. I looked into the blown-out fronts of little shops and houses, and saw how everything had been abandoned in that rush of women and children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the rooms were intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, with its cash-box on the bar counter, and games such as soldiers love--dominoes and darts, and quoits and bagatelle, set out as though for an evening's entertainment. Here was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the shelves, though most of the house was blown across the street. I looked through a hole in the wall to a drawing-room, with a piano, standing amid a litter of broken furniture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the sofa and chairs. But it was in the cellars that the pitiful drama had been--in those cellars down which I peered wondering whether any poor bodies lay there still. The shells had pierced down to some of the women hiding in them. Poison-gas came to choke some of them. Rescue parties of our R.A.M.C. went into Armentières immediately to get the poor creatures away, and risked their lives a score of times on each journey they made. It is an amazing thing that even then, in spite of their terror and their agony and their wounds, many of the old women could hardly be made to leave the town, and clung desperately to their homes, though these had fallen down on top of them.