silent streets one hears, "_Bang_---Pheeee---woooo" and then
far away "_dump._" One of ours. Then presently back comes
"Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_" One of theirs.

Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on. _Le Lion
d'Arras_, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its valiant sheets,
and has done so since the siege began.

The current number of _Le Lion d'Arras_ had to report a local German
success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme. There is to be a public
funeral and much ceremony. It is rare for anyone now to get killed;
everything is so systematised.

You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various angles,
and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is not without a
certain business activity. There is, I am told, a considerable influx
of visitors of a special sort; they wear khaki and lead the troglodytic
life. They play cards and gossip and sleep in the shadows, and may not
walk the streets. I had one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and
then one sees a British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the
pavement, mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air. The
streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.

The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of litter,
but many streets of the town have suffered very little. Here and there
a house has been crushed and one or two have been bisected, the front
reduced to a heap of splinters and the back halves of the rooms left
so that one sees the bed, the hanging end of the carpet, the clothes
cupboard yawning open, the pictures still on the wall. In one place
a lamp stands on a chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off