It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in the great battle, but it gives also in outline a narrative of that great military operation which has done irreparable damage to the German right wing in its plan of campaign and thrust it back across the Ourcq in a great retiring movement which has also begun upon the German centre and left.

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.

I reached Arras on Sept. 29.  The Germans had occupied it a fortnight earlier.  Now it was placid, sleepy, and deserted, and bore no outward signs of having suffered from their occupation.  I learned, however, that although they had refrained from demolishing buildings, there had been scenes of debauchery, and private houses had been ransacked.

It was declared that the only German paying for anything during the whole of the fortnight’s occupation was a member of the Hohenzollern family, an important officer who had made the Hotel d’Univers his headquarters.

I decided to pass on to Vitry-en-Artois, twelve miles distant and six kilometers from Douai, where I had heard the Allies were in force.  Here I obtained a room in a hotel.

Within a short while I saw armed cars.  There came many warriors in many cars, cars fitted with mitrailleuses, cars advancing backward, cars with two soldiers in the back of each with their rifles rested on the back cushions and their fingers on the triggers, and with the muzzles of mitrailleuses pointing over their heads.  Several cavalry scouts, too, are in the streets.

Once I ventured my head a little outside of the door and was curtly warned to eliminate myself or possibly I would get shot.  I eliminated myself for the moment.