d
New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves. It was almost
a "walk-over." Only here and there groups of Germans served their
machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their
dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts.
I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great
gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there. The
following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the
Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way
when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses
and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had
often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing
was left but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were
comparatively small, though some brave men had died, including Major
Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in
Ireland.

Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:

"The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering... The 7th of
June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the
price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the
front was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage;
apparently it only intended to improve its position for the launching
of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between
the old Arras battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. The
object of the enemy was to wear us down and distract our attention from
Ypres."

That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I
saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the
enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining
villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun
fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered
in clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was
the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army,
and it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in
Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to
escape.

All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its
ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was
getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had ups