One man of the Cheshires described to me how he saw a German officer run out of a dug-out, which had been a blockhouse blown in at each end by our heavy shell-fire, and make for another one which still stood intact. With some of his comrades, our man chased him, and there was a great fight in the second blockhouse before the survivors surrendered, among them the officer, who gave to my friend a big china pipe and a case full of cigars as souvenirs. He was killed afterwards by one of his own men, who sniped him as he was walking back to our lines. In another strong point there was a great and terrible fight. The Prussian garrison refused to surrender, and a party of ours fought them until they were destroyed. "It was more lively than Wytschaete," said a man who was in this fight. "It was less tame-like, and the Fritzes put up a better show." They fought hard round Prince's House and Jarrock's Farm and Pioneer House, not far from Hollebeke Château.
The prisoners I saw to-day were shaken men. Most of them were young fellows of twenty-one, belonging to the 1916 class, and there were none of the youngest boys among them. But they were white-faced and haggard, and looked like men who had passed through a great terror, which indeed was their fate. They belonged mostly to the 207th Prussian Division, and had suffered before the battle from our great shell-fire, which had caused many casualties among their reliefs and ration parties. Many other prisoners belonged to the 121st Division. I can only give this glimpse or two of the crowded scenes and the many details of to-day's battle. To-morrow there will be time perhaps to write more, giving a deeper insight into this day of good success, which is cheering after so much desperate fighting--over the same fields, although never to so far a goal.
In spite of many German counter-attacks yesterday and many vain and costly attempts to counter-attack to-day, we hold all the ground gained by our men yesterday, except at one or two strong points, after their victorious progress. This morning when I went again among the men who have been fighting--there was a blue sky over the rags and tatters of the City of Ypres, and behind the tall, solitary tree-stumps on the ridge that goes up to Polygon Wood by way of Glencorse Copse, and all the air was filled with the song of many aeroplanes--all that I learned yesterday about the battle was made more certain by the narratives of these young soldiers, who are proud and glad of what they call a real good show. The wounded men walking down over the wide stretch of fields, which are still under gun-fire, weak with loss of blood, suffering the first pain of their wounds, and shaken by their experiences under shells and machine-gun fire, spoke with a quiet enthusiasm of the day's success, and said "It was easy" behind such a colossal barrage as our guns rolled in front of them. Some of them in their eagerness went too fast for the barrage in order to chase the enemy, and I have met Australians here and there and some men of the Welsh Regiment, who fought farther south, wounded because they ran in front of the barrage-lines, and were caught in our shell-splinters. But that was a rare episode, and along the whole line of attack the men followed the moving walls of shells, vast shells that fling up masses of earth like suburban villas, and the smaller shells that fell like confetti, all glinting in the wet mist, and felt sure that the enemy in front of them, would have lost all his fight when they reached his hiding-places, if any lived. Many Germans died on that ground, so that the shell-holes between the blockhouses are wet graves in which their bodies lie, and many of the blockhouses which resisted so long in former attacks are smashed, or at least so battered that the garrisons inside were dazed and demoralized by the fearful hammering at their walls.