On the right one of our trenches was mined and then abandoned.  As soon as it was occupied by the enemy the charges were fired and several Germans were blown to pieces.

Thursday, Nov. 12, was marked by a partial lull in the fighting all along our line.  To the north a German force which had crossed the Yser and intrenched on the left bank was annihilated by a night attack with the bayonet, executed by the French.  Slightly to the south the enemy was forced back for three-quarters of a mile.  Immediately on our left the French were strongly attacked and driven back a short distance, our extreme left having to conform to this movement.  Our allies soon recovered the ground they had lost, however, and this enabled us to advance also.

To the southeast of Ypres the enemy’s snipers were very active.  On our centre and right the enemy’s bombardment was maintained, but nothing worthy of special note occurred.

The fact that on this day the advance against our line in front of Ypres was not pushed home after such an effort as that of Wednesday tends to show that for the moment the attacking troops had had enough.

Although the failure of this great attack by the Guard Corps to accomplish their object cannot be described as a decisive event, it possibly marks the culmination if not the close of the second stage in the attempt to capture Ypres, arid it is not without significance.  It has also a dramatic interest of its own.  Having once definitely failed to achieve this object by means of the sheer weight of numbers, and having done their best to wear us down, the Germans brought in fresh picked troops to carry the Ypres salient by an assault from the north, the south and the east.  That the Guard Corps should have been selected to act against the eastern edge of the salient may be taken as proof of the necessity felt by the Germans to gain this point in the line.

Their dogged perseverance in pursuance of their objective claims whole-hearted admiration.  The failure of one great attack, heralded as it was by an impassioned appeal to the troops made in the presence of the Emperor himself, but carried out by partially trained men, has been only the signal for another desperate effort in which the place of honor was assigned to the corps d’elite of the German Army.

It must be admitted that the Guard Corps has retained that reputation for courage and contempt of death which it earned in 1870, when Emperor William I., after the battle of Gravelotte, wrote:  “My Guard has found its grave in front of St. Privat,” and the swarms of men who came up bravely to the British rifles in the woods around Ypres repeated the tactics of forty-four years ago when their dense columns, toiling up the slopes of St. Privat, melted away under the fire of the French.