Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 147, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1919 — AS WAR MEMENTO [ARTICLE]

AS WAR MEMENTO

Public Square of Arras Is to Be Preserved. Just as War Left It, It Will Serve to Remind the World That Here the Marauding Huna Were Checked. In the Little Place of Arras, where once stood the Hotel de Ville, with its belfry apd its peal of bells, led by La Joyeuse, is today a notice board in English. It says that this place is to be pressed in its ruin as war has left Other places will be rebuilt again, and will forget, but this Little Place will remain empty, and ope day Arras will be more proud of that emptiness and of those few broken stones than are other towns of the most beautiful things that they possess. For so Arras will remain always, as it is today one of the rocks visible on which the great waters of invasion broke and surged and broke again, but could flow no farther. There they were held. There In the center of Arras you come suddenly today on the dark line of their highest tide. Elsewhere, across the open country, you come more gradually in the land of war, by roads where troops move, by fields where are lines and lines of brown and white trenches, ready but never used; by empty villages, with here and there a house broken; and so at last into the great No Man’s land of France, uninhabited, uninhabitable, where armies fought and fought again, until all is destroyed and men live a gypsy life by the roadside. But in Arras you turn a corner of one of the little streets and it is as if a window had opened suddenly and you looked out on war. For three years one could only enter Arras from the west, by the road from Doullens through the Amiens gate or by the road from St. Pol past Dead Man’s corner, where nightly the reliefs, coming up, were shelled. Beside 'both these roads the trees stand, and the fields are tilled and there are-woods across the hills. You enter Arras today —through —a country unchanged by war. The change is not yet. It is a silent town. Its houses, stand, though scarcely one is quite whole. Their shutters are closed--their broken faces boarded up. The town is like a man that sleeps after long suffering. -So you pass through cobbled streets, very gray, clean, silent streets, between those exhausted houses, going down the Rue St. Aubert and by the white hospital with Its green vine leaves. Then you turn up other little streets, with their narrow sky above them and come, very suddenly, on an open lane with banks on either side, where nettles and coltsfoot and loosestrife grow. But this that looks like a country lane is cobbled, and its banks are heaps of brick. It is as you enter this lane that yon are conscious of something more unexpected and more awful than any ruined and broken things—of an enormous emptiness in the middle of that town of tall houses and narrow streets. * When the years have passed and all the country to the east of Arras has long been made whole; when the trees grow again beside the Cam bral and the Bapaume roads and there are cottages once more In Beaurains and Remy and Vls-en-Artois, there will still be that sudden emptiness beneath the sky among the narrow streets of Arras. Standing there, men will remember that once one >could come into Arras only from the west. They will think of it then as of one of those towns, now far inland and surrounded by quick fields, which once were on the seashore. They will look at that gray ruin of the town hall as at the ruins of a rock where once the storms beat.