touched by the bombardment. There had been no shells to waste
on the square while the more precious Town Hall had one stone left
upon another. From the lower end of the square, sheltered from the
rain by the arcade, I made a rough sketch of what remains of the
Town Hall. Comparing this sketch with an engraved view taken from
exactly the same spot, one can see graphically what had occurred.
A few arches of the ground-floor colonnade had survived in outline.
Of the upper part of the facade nothing was left save a fragment of
wall showing two window-holes. The rest of the facade, and the
whole of the roof, was abolished. The later building attached to the
left of the facade had completely disappeared. The carved masonry
of the earlier building to the right of the facade had survived in a
state of severe mutilation. The belfry which, rising immediately
behind the Town Hall, was once the highest belfry in France (nearly
250 feet), had vanished. The stump of it, jagged like the stump of a
broken tooth, obstinately persisted, sticking itself up to a level a few
feet higher than the former level of the crest of the roof. The vast
ruin was heaped about with refuse.

Arras is not in Germany. It is in France. I mention this fact because it
is notorious that Germany is engaged in a defensive war, and in a
war for the upholding of the highest civilisation. The Germans came
all the way across Belgium, and thus far into France, in order to
defend themselves against attack. They defaced and destroyed all
the beauties of Arras, and transformed it into a scene of desolation
unsurpassed in France, so that the highest civilisation might remain
secure and their own hearths intact. One wonders what the
Germans would have done had they been fighting, not a war of
defence and civilisation, but a war of conquest and barbarism. The
conjecture may, perhaps, legitimately occupy the brains of citizens.