"No; an' we'll hang on yere like 'ell, even if they brings the ole bloomin' German army."
"Sure. If Jerry thinks 'e can show us 'ow to shoot 'e has made a 'ell of a outer."
"D'you know," shyly, "we 'ave done somethin' big!"
"Yes; I s'pose we 'ave."
The very men who had fought on and made good in face of odds that no man in his senses would have bet on at a thousand to one chance, opined that they had "done something big," or at least they "s'posed so."
No Regiment in the Empire, or out of it, could have done more. They had to "hang on" at any cost. They did: simply, doggedly.
The Guards—rushed up to the southern portion of the sector and launched against the German advance—with a determination and tenacity of purpose against which the offered opposition was futile, turned the enemy flank and forced them back in the direction of their original (November 30th) line through Cambrai.
A strong detachment fell back on the Masnières-Rumilly sector, thereby enforcing on the small Norman remnant a further infliction of bloody fighting and casualties. The Guards swept back the waves of grey upon the Guernseys, who could not retreat—for a few hundred yards behind them the rest of the Brigade were holding up a further enemy element.
Our own artillery, harassing the Fritz retreat, sent over a number of shells into Masnières. Fritz batteries, in response to the urgency of the situation, hailed down shrapnel on a scale only equalled on the morning of their onslaught. The Normans came in for the thick of it.
The men holding the far end of the little town found themselves swamped down in the overwhelming rush of an entire retreating Battalion. They were prisoners before the abrupt alteration in the direction of the German movement had dawned on them.