The attack had now spread along the whole line of the canal; but except at the loop the enemy could make no impression. There, however, numbers told at last, and about the middle of the afternoon the Third Division was ordered to retire from the salient, and the Fifth Division on its left directed to conform. Bridges were blown up--the Royal Engineers vying with the other services in the race for glory: and by the night of the 23d, after various vicissitudes, the Second Army Corps had fallen back as far as the line Montreuil-Wasmes-Paturages-Frameries. That the retirement, though successful, was expensive, is not to be wondered at, when it is remembered that throughout this action, as we now know, the Second Army Corps was outnumbered by three to one. All ranks, however, were in excellent spirits. Allowing for handicaps, they felt that they had proved themselves the better men. It was a feeling which was to be severely tried in the next few days. At 5 P.M. on Sunday the 23d, as the Second Corps was withdrawing from the canal, the British Commander-in-Chief received a most unexpected telegraph from General Joffre, the Generalissimo of the Allied armies, to the effect that at least three German army corps were moving against the British front, and that a fourth corps was endeavouring to outflank him from the west. He was also informed that the Germans had on the previous day captured the crossings of the Sambre between Charleroi and Namur, and that the French on his right were retiring. In other words, Namur, the defensive pivot of the Anglo-French line, on the resistance of which--if only for a few days--the Allied strategy had depended, had fallen almost at a blow. By Saturday the Germans had left Namur behind, and in numbers far exceeding French predictions had seized the crossings of the Sambre and Middle Meuse and were hammering at the junction of the Fifth and Fourth French Armies in the river-fork. The junction was pierced, and the French, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly assaulted both in front and flank, could do nothing but retire. By 5 P.M. on the Sunday, when the message was received at British Headquarters, the French had been retiring for anywhere from ten to twelve hours. The British Army was for the moment isolated. Standing forward a day’s march from the French on its right, faced and engaged by three German corps in front, and already threatened by a fourth corps on its left, it seemed a force marked out for destruction. In the British Higher Command, however, there was no flurry. There is a thing called British phlegm.