*When War Burst on Arras*
[A Special Dispatch to THE NEW YORK TIMES and The London Daily
Chronicle.]
A TOWN IN FRANCE, Oct. 7.--Arras has been the pivot of a fierce battle
which, commencing Thursday, was still in progress when I was forced to
leave the citadel three days later.
In that period I was fortunate enough to penetrate into the firing line,
and the experience is one that will never be dimmed in my memory. Like
the movements of so many pawns on a mammoth chessboard was the feinting
with scattered outposts to test the strength of the enemy.
I saw the action open with skirmishes at Vitry-en-Artois, and next
morning one of the hardest battles which make a link in the chain flung
right across France of the gigantic battle of rivers was being
prosecuted before my eyes.
The days that ensued were full of feverish and hectic motion. Arras
rattled and throbbed with the flow of an army and all the tragedy which
war brings in its train. There were moments when its cobbled streets
were threaded by streams of wounded from the country beyond. Guns boomed
incessantly, a fitting requiem to the sad little processions which
occasionally revealed that some poor fellow had sacrificed his life for
the flag which accompanied him to his grave.
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