Throughout the length of interlinked chain of advances the fighting was of the utmost ferocity.
For the first time in the war the British were making sharp drives and smashes like a skillful pugilist, every one of which contained force enough to have been considered a major attack in the history of other wars. In places the attack has shaken loose from the trenches and was being delivered along the lines of the old Napoleonic strategy.
The British captures of Vimy and later of Givenchy were looked on as victories of the utmost importance, equal to the storming by the Canadians of the Vimy Ridge. When this line of hills was firmly in the hands of the Canadians, they hauled their heavy guns up to the summit with extraordinary speed and proceeded to batter to pieces the powerful defenses of Vimy, while they made continual thrusts down the eastern slopes.
In 1915 Vimy was for a time held by the French under Gen. Foch, but they were shouldered out with great slaughter by the Germans, who proceeded to lavish the last details of their military science upon the fortifications of the town.
Givenchy, too, before which many British dead lie buried, was a stronghold upon which the Germans counted to stem any advance.
On April 16 the extension of the British attack nearly to Loos threatened to pocket Lens, just as a loop had been thrown around St. Quentin, and the fall of this industrial city with its rich coal mines was considered inevitable. Indeed, credible reports had been received in Paris that the devastation of the rich city of Lille by the Germans was well under way, indicating that they contemplated a reluctant evacuation of the most important center in northern France. At all events, an immediate ebb in the German tide was necessitated by the British successes of April 9 to 16. The momentum of Field Marshal Haig's advance and the successes of the French on their share of the western front appeared to make a further retirement of the whole German line imperative—and the great Allied drive had scarcely begun.
SCENE OF THE CANADIAN VICTORY.
An exploration on April 13 of Vimy Ridge, carried by the Canadian troops in a series of historic charges, showed that the British artillery virtually blew off the top of it, and the German stronghold which had resisted all efforts of the French and British during more than two years of war, was finally forced into such a position by high explosives that it could no longer resist infantry charges. Walking on the top of the ridge was a continuous climb from one shell crater to another. Two surmounting knobs, known only on military maps as numbered hills, had attracted the fire of the heaviest British guns and had been shattered into unrecognizable buttes on the landscape.
It was little wonder the Germans made such desperate efforts to hold the Vimy ridge and to retake certain portions of it by counter attacks which failed miserably. The ridge stood as a natural barrier between the Germans and their opponents and was a great protective chain of hills shielding invaluable coal, iron, and other mineral lands that Germany had wrested from France in the first onrush of the war in 1914. The city of Lens, within sight of the British lines, from the ridge, is a great mining center.
THE FRENCH VICTORY AT SOISSONS.