On the afternoon of the 27th every gun that could possibly be brought to bear opened a furious fire upon the Hill 70 Redoubt. For two hours the bombardment continued in a light that nearly broke the observers' hearts, so early did the evening close in, and so persistently hung the mist. Then, with one earth-shaking salvo from the massed batteries, it ceased, and the Guards Division rushed to the assault. What they achieved will probably never be accurately known, undoubtedly they penetrated the first line of the redoubt, but the enemy, continually reinforced from his fortress of Cité St. Auguste, contrived to expel them, and slowly they were swept back, in the gathering darkness of night, to the positions from which they had sprung. The attack had failed, Hill 70, the key of Lens, was still in the enemy's hands. The strength of this position lay perhaps not so much in its natural advantages, as in the artificial means which had been employed to render it capable of effective defence. Its position upon one of the main arteries leading from the fortress of Lens made it easy to reinforce from Cité St. Auguste, one of the outliers of that fortress. The western slopes of the hill, up which the attack must come, formed a sort of glacis to the redoubt, on to which observers in the redoubt itself or in the woods around La Ferme des Mines de Lens could direct fire from their batteries at Pont-a-Vendin, Cité St. Emile and Cité St. Laurent. The work itself was of considerable extent and exceptionally formidable, and was probably impregnable by frontal attack when fully manned. Further, all possible approaches to it were enfiladed from the northward by machine-gun fire from Puits XIV bis and some ruined houses at the edge of a small wood, and from the southward by the strong works at the edge of Cité St. Auguste, namely Puits XI and a building known as the Dynamitière. Our failure to capture this important strategical point was therefore regrettable, but not incomprehensible. A couple of days after the failure of our last attack upon Hill 70, a redistribution of the front took place between the Allied Armies. The Tenth French Army took over the new line up to a point near the Chalk Pit Wood, the boundary of their territory, which included the village of Loos, being now roughly a line drawn from this point through Quality Street, and thence along the Lens-Béthune Road. From this time Hill 70 ceased to be a British objective, and the whole of the line in front of Lens came under one command, instead of being divided right in front of the fortress, a change of considerable administrative advantage.