One hears controversy amongst the experts as to whether Lens or Arras is the most affecting illustration of what war does to organized human society. There is much to be said for both sides of the argument. In Lens ruin is so complete as to almost blur the sense of human association; but Arras is the pitiful spectacle of a huge collection of uninhabitable houses—domestic shrines from which the fire has gone cold and can never be revived. There they stood gaunt, tottering and cheerless—windows out, doors hanging awry, gaping holes in the walls, the roofs fallen in, the broken and sagging floors and all the pitiful and touching relics of destroyed domestic life, pictures still hanging on the walls, broken furniture, torn and destroyed clothing. The Grande Place of Arras—a succession of attractive buildings in the Spanish style all built to a plan, with a wide colonnaded walk beneath them around the square—is a dreadful, heart-rending ruin. An occasional building in Arras affords shelter to returning refugees; and there is here a considerable and increasing population. In one narrow street a number of shops have reopened and make as brave a showing as is possible among the ruins. Lens and Arras are the ruins of war—the by-product of great powers in a death-grip. But Cambrai is a ruin of another sort. It is a monument to the malignant spirit of the Hun in defeat. As the British and the Canadians closed in from the south and the north they spared the city which they knew was fated to fall to them; no shell fell in its borders save by inadvertence. But this did not avail to save this ancient famous town. The Canadians entered it to find it deserted, all the civilian population having been carried off, and on fire from a hundred conflagrations systematically set with the aid of inflammable bombs, petrol and firewood; and while the Germans fell back towards their own land a pillar of smoke from the burning city bespoke their rage at being robbed of their prey. Cambrai is the burned-out shell of a town—a mere wraith of its former charms. All these cities—and to them may be added, St. Quentin, Albert, Ypres, and a hundred smaller places—will have to be rebuilt from the foundations upward; but first they will have to be demolished stone by stone and the rubbish carried away—a huge task which is not yet begun, awaiting perhaps the reparation money which will be of right the first after-the-war charge against the resources of Germany.