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In this manner the British and Canadians, who fought so valiantly and with so little apparent success at Stony Mountain and Rue d'Ouvert, were in a measure responsible for the French victories at Angres, Souchez, and the Labyrinth.
What a plain! Pit-heads, superb vegetation, and ruined villages tragic villages illustrating the glories and the transcendent common-sense of war and invasion. That place over there is Souchez familiar in all mouths from Arkansas to Moscow for six months past. What an object! Look at St. Eloi! Look at Angres! Look at Neuville St. Vaast! And look at Ablain St. Nazaire, the nearest of all!
In the Artois they seized the junction of the highroads between Bethune and Arras and between Ablain and Angres. North of Carleul they held the Germans in check against a heavy artillery, infantry, and bomb attack, but were driven out of some trenches they had previously won on Lingekopf.
The British attempted to continue their offensive by driving between Loos and Hulluch, the most important and at the same time the most dangerous section on the British front. By steadily forging ahead southeast of Loos toward Hill 70, the British were driving a wedge into the German line and creating a perilous salient around the town of Angres as the center.
The capture of Wancourt and Heninel broke off another fragment of the Siegfried line, while to the north our advance spread up to the gates of Lens; the villages of Bailleul, Willerval, Vimy, Givenchy-en-Gohelle, Angres, and Lievin, with the Double Crassier and several of the suburbs of Lens, fell into our hands.
But the French were harried by the artillery in Angres and the machine guns in Ablain, and their discomforts were added to by the work of the bursting shells which opened the graves of soldiers who had been slain in previous months. Carency, surrounded on the east, south and west, and wrecked by the 20,000 shells which had been fired upon it, surrendered on the afternoon of May 12, 1915.
Souchez and its advanced bastion, the Château Carleul, had been made into a formidable fortification by the changing of the course of the Carency streams. The Germans had transformed the marshy ground to the southeast of this front into a perfect swamp, which was regarded as impassable. The German batteries posted at Angres were able to enfilade the valley on the north.
Captain Shields went on leave and "D" Company was commanded by Captain John Burnett, who, on his return from England, had been sent to the 4th Battalion, but soon worked his way back to us. It was now our turn to go to the right Brigade sector, previously held by the Staffordshires, and on the 12th May we marched up to Red Mill, between Angres and Liévin.
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