A counter-attack was organized. It was preceded by a very heavy bombardment of the German positions with all available guns firing high-explosive shells. Then--it was 2.30 p.m.--the attack went forward. It was led by the 10th Hussars, who went forward with such splendid dash that at the sight of them the gallant Leicester Yeomanry, reduced in numbers as they were, could not restrain themselves, but tumbled out of their trenches and joined in the rush. The Essex Yeomanry and the Blues (Royal Horse Guards) also took part in the attack. The behaviour of the Blues has been described to me as particularly fine. These magnificent men went forward under a very heavy fire of shrapnel and high-explosive as steady as on parade. The Germans were routed out of the trenches they had won from us. The Germans fairly bolted, in some instances with the cavalry after them. Our armoured motor-cars, great heavy vehicles, played a part in this counter-attack. It was, I believe, their début in the war. Some of them, under Lieutenant Cadman, dashed down the _chaussées_ and opened fire on the Germans in their trenches in the roadside woods. For a little while it was as though we had returned to the war in the open. But the position we had won was untenable. The trenches were merely holes half filled with dead and débris, and the German shell-fire was pitiless. So our men had to fall back to “an irregular line in rear, principally the craters of shell-holes,” to quote Sir Herbert Plumer once more. That night our line remained intact in its former position, with the exception of a small distance lost by one cavalry division. Later the line was advanced, and fresh trenches dug slightly in the rear of the original line, but in a less exposed position. May 13 may be reckoned the last day of the second battle of Ypres. It is too early to say how many men “went west” in the interval that elapsed between the April evening when we blew up the mines on Hill 60 and the May afternoon when almost for the first time for twenty-six days the inferno of fire abated in the woods and pastures about Ypres. It was not a battle like the first battle of Ypres, when our men met the flower of the Prussian Army face to face, and withstood a succession of onslaughts delivered with an incredible disregard of human life. The second battle of Ypres was a battle of machinery, in which the German infantry skulked behind their gas-cylinders and machine-guns, and waited for their heavy guns to prepare for them victory at a cheap price.