at Saint Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen
photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a building
I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have not been very
deeply moved. I suppose that one is a little accustomed to Gothic ruins,
and that there is always something monumental about old buildings; it is
only a question of degree whether they are more or less tumble-down. I
was far more desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt
and Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens
round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me all the
sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.

Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the actual
fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only temporary,
that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the people of the
devastated villages would return to build their houses and till their
fields again. But I see now that not only are homes and villages
destroyed almost beyond recognition, but the very fields are destroyed.
They are wildernesses of shell craters; the old worked soil is buried
and great slabs of crude earth have been flung up over it. No ordinary
plough will travel over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere
chunks of timber, horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of
big shells, and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the
mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high explosives, and
across it run the twisting trenches and communication trenches eight,
ten, or twelve feet deep. These will become water pits and mud pits into
which beasts will fall. It is incredible that there should be crops from
any of this region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade
left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the spirit
to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole
proofs that life may still go on.