We return from this personal note, arising out of the change of Command, to the intense struggle outside Houlthulst Forest. It was renewed three times in October, a bloody October for the 49th Division, as for the British Army as a whole, and, at last, on the last day of that month, the British line had been carried, foot by foot, till within about 300 yards of the contested village of Passchendaele. One more week of effort was demanded of the Troops exhausted by four months’ bloodshed, and the final assault was delivered on November 6th, when the village fell to the Canadians. In the course of four days’ further fighting the last crests of the ridges were secured, and the long Third Battle of Ypres was definitely terminated. Who had won it? Counting July 31st as the first day of that phase of the Third Battle, it had cost the Germans over 24,000 prisoners. They had lost positions from Messines to Passchendaele, roughly, on a front of twelve miles, the value of which, small in area, had been recognized as cardinal in three great battles in three years. Because they had lost the positions, we may conclude that they had lost the Third Battle, as they had lost the First (1914) and had been stalemated in the Second (1915). But this conclusion does not contradict another, that Sir Douglas Haig had not won. He had not won the victory which he sought. If we compare the close with the opening of this long and brilliant Despatch (‘the Campaigns of 1917’), we see clearly by how much he had contracted his original bold design, and how grievously his large hopes had been disappointed by extraneous events. ‘The general conditions of the struggle this year,’ he recorded, ‘have been very different from those contemplated at the conference of Allied Commanders held in November, 1916. The great general and simultaneous offensive then agreed on did not materialize.’ We turn back to the plans at that Conference, so far as the British Commander reveals them.[90] They ‘comprised a series of offensives on all fronts, so timed as to assist each other by depriving the enemy of power of weakening any one of his fronts in order to reinforce another.’ The Arras battle was not to be pursued beyond its first objective: ‘it was my intention to transfer my main offensive to another part of my front.... I hoped, after completing my spring offensive further south, to be able to develop this Flanders attack without great delay, and to strike hard in the north before the enemy realized that the attack in the south would not be pressed further.’ But it ‘did not materialize,’ as has been said. The task of the British and French Armies had proved far heavier than was originally anticipated, and, on the other hand, the enemy’s means of resistance had proved ‘far greater than either he or we could have expected.’ We shall see in a later chapter how these disappointments imposed a change from the offensive to the defensive in the renewed campaign of 1918. Here