The acme of destruction is to be witnessed at Lens. This was the work of the Canadian artillery. In October, 1915 campaign the British drove for Hill Seventy, north of Lens, and the French for Vimy Ridge, both fruitlessly, despite initial success. It was assumed in all the "expert" military writing of that date that the possession by the Allies of these two hills would force the evacuation of the Lens coalfields by the Germans. The Canadians took Vimy Ridge in April, 1917; they pushed down the reverse side of the ridge and across the level ground to the outskirts of Lens within the next three months; in August they stormed Hill Seventy by one of the most brilliant minor operations of the war. But the Hun, contrary to the forecasts of the strategists, refused to quit Lens. It was half ringed by the Canadians, who kept it drowned in poison gas and buried under a constant rain of artillery projectiles; but the Germans, hidden in the rabbit warrens with which they honeycombed the foundations of the city, held on, and to every attempt to take possession of the ruined town they opposed a desperate and successful resistance. The Canadian plans included the storming in October, 1917, of Salumines Hill to the south-east of the city. Had this been done—and no Canadian staff officer had any doubt of the practicability of the enterprise—the Germans in Lens would have been trapped like rats; but the demands of the higher strategy intervened and the Canadians were shifted to the mud of Flanders, where they achieved the brilliant but fruitless distinction of taking Passchendaele ridge. So the Germans stayed on in Lens, and the Canadians, when they returned to their sector, resumed their daily occupation of spraying them with gas and pounding them with shell—with the result that when the line gave further south and the Germans had to fall back, the Allied armies entered Lens to find it the completest expression of the destructive possibilities of artillery fire that was supplied by any theatre of war. In this city, which once housed 50,000 people, not a single house remains—it is one huge red mass of red brick rubble through which roadways have been painfully excavated by labor battalions. Yet a few of the original inhabitants have crept back and can be seen standing in little disconsolate groups around the dust heaps which were their homes—living meanwhile in the German dugouts under the town. As I drove through the town on a blustering March morning, there still lingered in the air, four months after the firing of the last shot, the faint smell of human mortality. For in these huge rubbish heaps, if they are ever cleared away, will be found hundreds of Germans buried by the shells that destroyed them.