Over There: War Scenes on the Western FrontBennett, Arnold
History
Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front
Bennett, Arnold
Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
In the north transept a 325-mm. shell has knocked a clean hole
through which a mastodon might wriggle. Just opposite this
transept, amid universal wreckage, a cafe is miraculously
preserved. Its glass, mugs, counters, chairs, and ornaments are all
there, covered with white dust, exactly as they were left one night.
You could put your hand through a window aperture and pick up a
glass. Close by, the lovely rafter-work of an old house is exposed,
and, within, a beam has fallen from the roof to the ground. This
beam is burning. The flames are industriously eating away at it, like
a tiger gnawing in tranquil content at its prey which it has dragged to
a place of concealment. There are other fires in Arras, and have
been for some days. But what are you to do? A step further on is a
greengrocer's shop, open and doing business.
We gradually circled round the Cathedral until we arrived at the
Town Hall, built in the sixteenth century, very carefully restored in
the nineteenth, and knocked to pieces in the twentieth. We
approached it from the back, and could not immediately perceive
what had happened to it, for later erections have clustered round it,
and some of these still existed in their main outlines. In a great
courtyard stood an automobile, which certainly had not moved for
months. It was a wreck, overgrown with rust and pustules. This
automobile well symbolised the desolation, open and concealed, by
which it was surrounded. A touchingly forlorn thing, dead and deaf
to the never-ceasing, ever-reverberating chorus of the guns!
To the right of the Town Hall, looking at it from the rear, we saw a
curving double row of mounds of brick, stone, and refuse.
Understand: these had no resemblance to houses; they had no
resemblance to anything whatever except mounds of brick, stone,
and refuse. The sight of them acutely tickled my curiosity. "What is
this?"
"It is the principal street in Arras." The mind could picture it at once--
one of those narrow, winding streets which in ancient cities
perpetuate the most ancient habits of the citizens, maintaining their
commercial pre-eminence in the face of all town-planning; a street
leading to the Town Hall; a dark street full of jewellers' shops
and ornamented women and correctness and the triumph of
correctness; a street of the "best" shops, of high rents, of famous
names, of picturesque signs; a street where the wheels of traffic
were continually interlocking, but a street which would not, under
any consideration, have widened itself by a single foot, because its
narrowness was part of its prestige. Well, German gunnery has
brought that street to an end past all resuscitation. It may be rebuilt--
it will never be the same street.
"What's the name of the street?" I asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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