I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
how it stood.

In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
those stout old walls held up in spite of all.

Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.

I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
this that had opened the door.

Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.

As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed