All the arrangements were made with the utmost precision and secrecy for a midnight attack.  The favorable hour came.  The sun went down in clouds, and a night of Egyptian darkness enveloped the armies.  The glimmer of innumerable camp-fires only pointed out the position of the foe, without throwing any illumination upon the field.  Eugene visited all the posts of the army, ordered abundant refreshment to be distributed to the troops, addressed them in encouraging words, to impress upon them the importance of the enterprise, and minutely assigned to each battalion, regiment, brigade and division its duty, that there might be no confusion.  The whole plan was carefully arranged in all its details and in all its grand combination.  As the bells of Belgrade tolled the hour of twelve at midnight, three bombs, simultaneously discharged, put the whole Austrian army in rapid and noiseless motion.

A dense fog had now descended, through which they could with difficulty discern the twinkling lights of the Turkish camp.  Rapidly they traversed the intervening space, and in dense, solid columns, rushed over the ramparts of the foe.  Bombs, cannon, musketry, bayonets, cavalry, all were employed, amidst the thunderings and the lightnings of that midnight storm of war, in the work of destruction.  The Turks, roused from their slumber, amazed, bewildered, fought for a short time with maniacal fury, often pouring volleys of bullets into the bosoms of their friends, and with bloody cimeters smiting indiscriminately on the right hand and the left, till, in the midst of a scene of confusion and horror which no imagination can conceive, they broke and fled.  Two hundred thousand men, lighted only by the flash of guns which mowed their ranks, with thousands of panic-stricken cavalry trampling over them, while the crash of musketry, the explosions of artillery, the shouts of the assailants and the fugitives, and the shrieks of the dying, blended in a roar more appalling than heaven’s heaviest thunders, presented a scene which has few parallels even in the horrid annals of war.

The morning dawned upon a field of blood and death.  The victory of the Austrians was most decisive.  The flower of the Turkish army was cut to pieces, and the remnant was utterly dispersed.  The Turkish camp, with all its abundant booty of tents, provisions, ammunition and artillery, fell into the hands of the conqueror.  So signal was the victory, that the disheartened Turks made no attempt to retrieve their loss.  Belgrade was surrendered to the Austrians, and the sultan implored peace.  The articles were signed in Passarovitz, a small town of Servia, in July, 1718.  By this treaty the emperor added Belgrade to his dominions, and also a large part of Wallachia and Servia.