Moreover, we must look at a bigger map. Behind the actual fighting line lay Lille and Douai, railway-junctions of cardinal importance for the communication and supplies of the German armies. To strike at these towns through Lens, at the south-west corner of the triangle of which Lille formed the apex and Douai the heel, was an object desirable on its own account and full of promise for the succour of Ypres. If these plans, concerted with high hopes between General Foch and Sir John French, succeeded in threatening the railway-system behind, they were bound to react unfavourably on the German occupation of Belgium. And even if these larger plans failed, partly in consequence of the indentation of the semi-circle of troops guarding Ypres, there might still be a sufficient gain of ground and a sufficient slaughter of the enemy to affect his distribution of forces between the Western and the Eastern fronts. For the situation in Russia was already causing anxiety to her Allies. Hostilities were opened on May 9th by an intense attack of French artillery to the south-west of Lens on the road from Arras to Béthune, between La Targette and Carency. ‘That bombardment,’ says a graphic writer,[31] ‘was the most wonderful yet seen in Western Europe. It simply ate up the countryside for miles.’ Unfortunately, the mileage was not wide enough to open the way to Lens, and day by day the French advance was held up, pressed forward and held again, in a series of almost Homeric combats, which were measured by yards, even by feet, and in which the conspicuous names were White Works, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablain, the Sugar Refinery, Souchez, the cemetery at Neuville St. Vaast, and a terrible labyrinth of underground fortifications. The whole area, working up from the River Scarpe, was on a frontage of about seven miles, with Lens about six miles to the north-east. Each obstacle had to be surmounted not once only, but in many instances several times, and when, at the end of May, the German salient from the Lille-Douai road was flattened back at its southern extremity to the outskirts of Lens, which did not fall, the French success in the three weeks’ fighting seemed hardly commensurate with the cost. We shall be in a position to estimate it more precisely when we have taken into account the results which were attained further north. [Illustration]