doin'?", "Did we wash 'im out?", "Wot 'appened?"

"One at a time. Smashed in our line on a fifty mile front."

"WOT!" shouted in chorus.

"Yus. St. Quentin fallen. Fifth Army fair smashed up."

"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!

They glanced back upon Ypres. He would try for it ... take it? Day after
day the black budget of "falling back", "prisoners", "using up our
man-power," put the wind up them to such an extent that they began to
curse at their own impotency and helplessness; to fret angrily at a
forced comparative inactivity.

Why were they kept up there while "nothing was doing"? Why were they not
sent south to give a hand to the lads who were daily fighting a stubborn
retreat against avalanches of German reserves?

The Passchendaele sector remained unusually quiet; little strafing
occurred from either artillery, with the exception of a sunset
entertainment organised daily for the benefit of ration parties and
reliefs.

Aeroplanes, after prolonged reconnaissances far into Jerry's territory,
returned and the observers reported no movement or massing of enemy
troops, guns or transport were taking place on a scale beyond the
customary. No advance upon Ypres was at the moment anticipated unless he
still farther stretched out an already extended, far-flung battle zone.

The working parties put their backs into the work with every intention
of making a line upon which some thousands of Huns would be rendered
casualties before it capitulated. Jerry, watching them do it, with
ironical humour left them alone as if their labour were in vain, and
long before the trenches would be required the British Army would be cut
in two. Perhaps!

Fritz adopted a nasty habit in the form of lobbing over from fifteen
miles away a new type of heavy shell, apparently under experimental
observation. One fell among the Guernsey cook