August 16, 1917, marked another important advance for the French and British. Early in the morning the Allies, striking together on a nine-mile front east and northeast of Flanders, carried all their objectives excepting those on the right flank. French troops on the left drove the Germans from the tongue of land between the Yser Canal and the Martjevaart and won the bridgehead at Dreigrachten. Langemarck, which had been strongly held by the Germans since the Allied attack early in the month, was captured by Haig's troops, who swept forward half a mile beyond. On the right the British tried to win the high ground almost directly east of Ypres, lying north of the Menin road, but the Germans in face of appalling losses attacked in such fury that the British were forced to abandon the attempt. More than 1,800 prisoners, including thirty-eight officers and a number of guns, were captured by the Anglo-French forces in this advance. On the Lens battle front there was continuous fighting, the Germans making desperate efforts to recover their lost positions. The Canadians still clung tenaciously to Hill 70, having beaten off ten furious attacks directed by Prince Rupprecht. The Prussian Guard, so active in the fighting, here lost heavily. A Canadian machine-gun officer stated that his men had killed more Germans than they had ever seen together at any one time since fighting began here, having had as a target for an hour and a quarter enemy reenforcements coming up in columns of fours for use in counterattacks. The Seventh Prussian Division was completely annihilated. The fire of the Canadian guns was so intense that German ration parties refused to go to the relief of their comrades on the hill, and the hundreds of prisoners taken were in a half-famished condition, all the fighting spirit gone out of them. It was noted in the struggle here that many of the Germans were mere children. A large number of boys, not over seventeen were in the thick of the battle, and some were even younger, belonging evidently to the 1919 class. The attitude of the civilians who had been living in the suburbs of Lens would have puzzled a master psychologist. In the midst of terrors they remained calm and undismayed. Some had lived there since the beginning of the war, in houses that were repeatedly shelled and often wrecked. Death stalked them day and night. Yet they continued their peaceful vocations in cellars, their children being protected by gas masks going to school. When the British soldiers appeared, and while the shells were bursting a few yards away, young girls and women, for the most part neatly dressed and generally in black, were there to greet with cheerful faces the welcome visitors.