No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery of assault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be liquidated. New gun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line. Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking of it was confidently anticipated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it. The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position but the impossible held. Grey and terrible is Vimy Ridge with its line of block-houses and the masts of Farbus Wood. Looking outward from Vimy o'er the vast Arras war-scape the eye is sick and returns in vision to itself as the dove returned to the Ark when it found no other mercy of the Lord above misery's tide. Praise God the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with the top of its massive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the grass-grown rubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. The houses are grey or splotchy with their shrapnel marks still on them, but there are others which are red and white, and these stand gaping with empty glassless windows. You look on spangling new red roofs, you look on Noah's Arks, you look on half-consumed unsupported walls, you look on shadows which are pits where houses were. On the one hand is the lofty massiveness of the Episcopal Palace--on the other the irrecoverable smash of poor men's homes. From all this great city below, pious men and women used to come to the Cathedral--but now no more shall they come.