... Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_ One would
be irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of London, if
it were not for those unmeaning explosions.
I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board requested
us to walk around the silent square on the outside pavement and not
across it. The German sausage balloon had not been up for days; it had
probably gone off to the Somme; the Somme was a terrible vortex just
then which was sucking away the resources of the whole German line; but
still discipline is discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any
moment over the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was
fought for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged
breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where the
porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length of the
platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type, with a glass
roof whose framework still remains, though the glass powders the floor
and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot. The rails are rails of
rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall grasses grow amidst the
ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered from a shell or so, but there
are still the sofas of green plush, askew, a little advertisement hung
from the wall, the glass smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had
scattered a great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to
Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on.
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