This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back across the battlefield, and crowds of them within the barbed-wire enclosures set apart for them behind our lines. Our lightly wounded men coming down the tracks for walking wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages, of a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete victory. "We have him beat," say the men, and they are sure of this, sure of his enormous losses and of his broken spirit, although the fighting has been bloody because of the great gun-fire through which our men have had to pass. It has been a strange and terrible battle--terrible, I mean, in its great conflict of guns and men--and the enemy, if all goes well with us, may have to remember it as a turning-point in the history of this war, the point that has turned against him with a sharp and deadly edge. For, realizing his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the Passchendaele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that--all signs showed him that, and all our pressure on these positions--he prepared an attack against us in great strength in order to regain the ground he lost on September 26, or, if not that, then so to damage us that our advance would be checked until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they were not weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammering at the right wing by Cameron House, below Polygon Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our line, though for a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave anxiety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and critical. But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and now the German High Command decided for a big blow, and it was to be delivered at seven o'clock this morning. It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was fixed for an hour before his. And so it happened that our men had to pass through a German barrage to follow their own, a barrage which fell upon them before they leapt up to the assault, and it happened also most terribly for the enemy that our men were not stopped, but went through that zone of shells, and on the other side behind our barrage swept over the German assault troops and annihilated their plan of attack.... They did not attack. Their defence even was broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached and broke the second and third waves of the men who had been meant to attack, caught them in their support and reserve positions, and we can only guess what the slaughter has been. It is a slaughter in which five German divisions are involved.