The Pulaskian., 1919-05-09
AS WAR MEMENT0
Public Square of Arras Is fo D.
 Preserved.
Just as War Left It, It Will seu. Remind the World That Here 4k ]" Marauding Huns Were
 Checked.

Tn the Little Place of Arras wb.. once stood the Hotel de VilIe. With q. belfry and it's peal of bells. led bn s Joyeuse. is today notice board in Ra@ ae fish. It says that this place is to tS preserved in it's ruin as war bas ,as' 1t. ''
 Other places will be rebuilt aga,, and will forget, but this Little plaas will remain empty. and one day A. ras will be more proud of that emnt, ness and of those few broken stones than are other towns of the moss beautiful things that they possess.
 For so Arras will remain always os it is today one of the rocks yisibIo on which the great waters of inyasion broke and surged and broke agaln but could flow no farther. There thav were held. There in the center os Arras you come suddenly today on the dark line of their highest tide.
 Elsewhere, across the open country you come more gradually in tha 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 vii. lages, with here and there house broken; and so at last into the creat No Mans land of France, uninhablted uninhabitabie, where armies fought and fought again, until all is de stroyed and men live n gypsy life by the roadside. But in Arras you turn a corner of one of the little streets and It is as if 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 Mans corner, where nightly the reliefs, coming up. were shelled. Beside both these roads the trees stand, and the fields are titled and there are woods across the hills You enter Arras today through 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. Au- bert and by the white hospital with 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 net ties and coltsfoot and loosestrife grow. But this that looks like a eoun try lane is cobbled, and it's banks are heaps of brick.
 It is as you enter this lane that you 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 brai and the Bapaume roads and there are cottages once more In Beau rains and Remy and Vis-en-Artois there will still be that sudden emp tiness beneath the sky among the nar- row streets of Arras.
 Standing there, men will remem- Der 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 sur rounded by quick fields, which once were on the seashore. They VIII look at that gray ruin of the town hal as at the ruins of a great rock where once the storms beat.