The explosions continued all the morning and afternoon, and after seeing those Alsatian prisoners I could imagine the German pioneers under the same orders going about with charges in the cellars of the houses and deep down in the mine-shafts and galleries setting their fuses and touching them off from a safe distance. It was dirty work. Meanwhile, our men advancing from Liévin, and through it, were having a hard and costly task to rout out the machine-gun emplacements, especially in two terribly strong redoubts known to us as Crook and Crazy Redoubts, defending the western side of Lens. But though these were strong, fortified positions, there were machine-guns in many other places among all those groups of miners' cottages. I ought to explain that each group or collection of streets in the square blocks is called a "cité." In the northern part of Lens there are the Cité St.-Pierre, the Cité St.-Edouard, the Cité St.-Laurent, the Cité Ste.-Auguste, and the Cité Ste.-Elisabeth. Westward there are the Cité Jeanne-d'Arc and the Cité St.-Théodore. South there are the Cité du Moulin and the Cité de Riaumont. Each one of these places had its own separate defences of barbed wire and sand-bag barricades, and each a nest of machine-guns. It is clear that when these guns were served by rear-guard posts, ordered to hold on to the last, a quick advance through Lens would have been at great and needless sacrifice of life. When our men were checked a while by the terrible sweep of bullets in the northern and western cités our artillery opened heavy fire and poured in shells, which I watched from ground below Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. I had walked on from that ridge and was looking into Lens when I saw a movement of men below an embankment to the right of the small hill in the south of the city called Bois de Riaumont. Between the embankment and the hill was a sunken road leading just below the hill to a long straight street of ruined houses lined with an avenue of dead trees. There were belts of wire fixed down the hill-side from the wood on the crest. This ground, swept by sunlight, was the scene of a grim little drama which I watched with intense interest. At first I thought our men were about to make a direct assault upon the hill-side. They came swarming across the open ground in small groups widely scattered, but in two distinct waves. For a while they took cover under the embankment, while other groups crept up to them; then, after half an hour or so, they advanced again, half-left, at the double, led by an officer well in advance of all his men. They crossed the sunken road and went up the slope on the south side of the hill; but, instead of pressing up to the crest, suddenly disappeared into the long, straight street fringed with trees. No sooner had they gone down that sinister street then the enemy flung a barrage right along the embankment where they had first assembled. If they had still been there it would have