On April 16 the extension of the British attack nearly to Loos threatened to pocket Lens, just as a loop had been thrown around St. Quentin, and the fall of this industrial city with its rich coal mines was considered inevitable.  Indeed, credible reports had been received in Paris that the devastation of the rich city of Lille by the Germans was well under way, indicating that they contemplated a reluctant evacuation of the most important center in northern France.  At all events, an immediate ebb in the German tide was necessitated by the British successes of April 9 to 16.  The momentum of Field Marshal Haig’s advance and the successes of the French on their share of the western front appeared to make a further retirement of the whole German line imperative—­and the great Allied drive had scarcely begun.

SCENE OF THE CANADIAN VICTORY.

An exploration on April 13 of Vimy Ridge, carried by the Canadian troops in a series of historic charges, showed that the British artillery virtually blew off the top of it, and the German stronghold which had resisted all efforts of the French and British during more than two years of war, was finally forced into such a position by high explosives that it could no longer resist infantry charges.  Walking on the top of the ridge was a continuous climb from one shell crater to another.  Two surmounting knobs, known only on military maps as numbered hills, had attracted the fire of the heaviest British guns and had been shattered into unrecognizable buttes on the landscape.

It was little wonder the Germans made such desperate efforts to hold the Vimy ridge and to retake certain portions of it by counter attacks which failed miserably.  The ridge stood as a natural barrier between the Germans and their opponents and was a great protective chain of hills shielding invaluable coal, iron, and other mineral lands that Germany had wrested from France in the first onrush of the war in 1914.  The city of Lens, within sight of the British lines, from the ridge, is a great mining center.

THE FRENCH VICTORY AT SOISSONS.

On April 16 the “big push” of the Allies in France flared into a continuous battle covering nearly every mile of the long line from the North Sea to the Swiss border.  Between Soissons and Rheims the French engaged in a terrific struggle, driving forward in a solid mass against the German lines on a front of twenty-five miles.  Their way paved by ten days of “drum fire,” the troops of Gen. Nivelle swept forward, carrying all of the first line of German positions between Soissons and Craonne.  They also took the second line positions, south of Juvincourt, east of Craonne, reached the outskirts of Bermericourt, and advanced up the Aisne canal at Loivre and Courcy.

During these operations the French captured 10,000 Germans and a vast amount of war material.

The British were continuing their pressure on both Lens and St. Quentin, but were temporarily held up by a great storm on the 16th.  The night before they captured the village of Villaret, which straightened Field Marshal Haig’s line northwest of St. Quentin, and made further progress to the northwest of Lens.  The prison cages to the rear of Arras were filled with German prisoners, nearly all of whom were captured in a dazed condition from the terrific British fire that won the great battle of Arras.