Soissons was in very much the same case as Arras. There was the same
pregnant silence in her streets, the same effect of waiting for the
moment which draws nearer and nearer, when the brooding German lines
away there will be full of the covert activities of retreat, when the
streets of the old town will stir with the joyous excitement of the
conclusive advance.

The organisation of Soissons for defence is perfect. I may not describe
it, but think of whatever would stop and destroy an attacking party or
foil the hostile shell. It is there. Men have had nothing else to do and
nothing else to think of for two years. I crossed the bridge the English
made in the pursuit after the Marne, and went into the first line
trenches and peeped towards the invisible enemy. To show me exactly
where to look a seventy-five obliged with a shell. In the crypt of the
Abbey of St. Medard near by it--it must provoke the Germans bitterly to
think that all the rest of the building vanished ages ago--the French
boys sleep beside the bones of King Childebert the Second. They shelter
safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. An ineffective shell from a
German seventy-seven burst in the walled garden close at hand as I came
out from those thousand-year-old memories again.

The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly so completely smashed up
as the one at Arras; I doubt if it has been very greatly fired into.
There is a peculiar beauty in the one long vertical strip of blue sky
between the broken arches in the chief gap where the wall has tumbled
in. And the people are holding on in many cases exactly as they are
doing in Arras; I do not know whether it is habit or courage that is
most apparent in this persistence. About the chief place of the town
there are ruined houses, but some invisible hand still keeps the grass