The number of men employed in the action on the British side was forty-eight thousand. During the early surprise of the action the loss was slight. Had the wire in front of the Twenty-third Brigade been cut by the artillery assigned to such action, and had the telephone system not been destroyed the success of the thrust would have been complete. The delay of four and a half hours between the first and second phases of the attack caused virtually all the losses sustained by the attacking force. The total casualties were 12,811 men of the British forces. Of these 1,751 officers and privates were taken prisoners and 10,000 officers and men were killed and wounded. The action continued throughout Thursday, March 11th, with little change in the general situation. The British still held Neuve Chapelle and their intrenchments threatened Aubers. On Friday morning, March 12th, the Crown Prince of Bavaria made a desperate attempt under cover of a heavy fog to recapture the village. The effort was made in characteristic German dense formations. The Westphalian and Bavarian troops came out of Biez Wood in waves of gray-green, only to be blown to pieces by British guns already loaded and laid on the mark. Elsewhere the British waited until the Germans were scarcely more than fifty paces away when they opened with deadly rapid fire before which the German waves melted like snow before steam. It was such slaughter as the British had experienced when held up before Aubers. Slaughter that staggered Germany. [Illustration: AN INCIDENT OF THE WAR IN FLANDERS A Bavarian battery caught in British gunfire while limbering up. Only three guns escaped in the hail of bursting shells.] So ended Neuve Chapelle, a battle in which the decision rested with the British, a victory for which a fearful price had been paid but out of which came a confidence that was to hearten the British nation and to put sinews of steel into the British army for the dread days to come. The story of Neuve Chapelle was repeated in large and in miniature many times during the deadlock of trench warfare on the western front until victory finally came to the Allies. During those years the western battle-front lay like a wounded snake across France and Belgium. It writhed and twisted, now this way, now that, as one side or the other gambled with men and shells and airplanes for some brief advantage. It bent back in a great bulge when von Hindenburg made his famous retreat in the winter of 1916 after the Allies had pressed heavily against the Teutonic front upon the ghastly field of the Somme. The record is one of great value to military strategists, to the layman it is only a succession of artillery barrages, of gas attacks, of aerial reconnaissances and combats.