"Good Gawd!"
"Ten miles into our lines."
"Oh, 'ell!"
"Took thirty thousand prisoners—Gawd knows 'ow many guns."
"WOT!"
"Thousands of casualties."
"And 'ave we stopped 'im?"
"No—still fallin' back."
Pessimism, something akin to consternation, found a hold upon the mental outlook of the troops in the sector. They had held an extraordinary unshakeable faith in the might of the Army, in its absolute certainty of holding impregnable what had been theirs from 1916, and upon which all enemy attempts had realised no concrete success.
And now, at one mighty knock-out blow, the Army was in retreat on a fifty mile front!