_One of the mine craters blown on the Vimy Ridge as a first step in the attack which captured the Ridge in 1917._] [Illustration: _PLATE XLVII._ AT THELUS. _One of the German gun emplacements on the north of the Vimy Ridge which, being outside our direct observation, made it so important that the Ridge should be taken._] [Illustration: _PLATE XLVIII._ THE ROAD TO LENS. _From the Vimy Ridge (seen in the distance in the photograph) our men could look straight along the four miles of road to Lens; but it was eighteen months after the capture of the Ridge that they actually got possession of what was left of the town._] [Illustration: _PLATE XLIX._ LENS UNDER SNOW. _The wilderness that was once Lens, as it appeared early in 1919._] [Illustration: _PLATE L._ LENS. _Later on in 1919 some sheds and temporary buildings were to be seen wherever space had been cleared for their erection. Another visit some months later showed that very much progress had been made in the way of reconstruction, but of course, as a whole, the town is still a mass of ruins._] VII.--THE SOMME (PLATES 51 TO 66.) I have been able to traverse several times since the war the great stretch of country in Picardy which is generally spoken of at home as "the Somme"--country over which much of our hardest fighting took place in 1916 and 1918, and where thousands of our brave men are now lying. We became only too familiar with the names of places within it, which might have peacefully remained for centuries more in the happy oblivion in which they had rested for centuries past, had not the war waves broken upon them and destroyed them while making them immortal. Much of the country had been so completely devastated that there was nothing in it or on it to show in a picture--nothing beyond an irregular expanse of ground broken everywhere into shell-holes and covered over with an untidy wild herbage of rank weeds. But the interest of this country to all of us at home--and "at home" in this case more than ever includes the homes overseas--is so close and so poignant that it is probably worth while to add here some little description of the characteristics of the great area which we call "the Somme," and the positions of the places which we fought over.