Retreating is often more difficult than attacking.
Under the relentless pressure of the pursuing enemy forces, how to deploy troops for defense, how to organize and arrange the retreat, how to hold off the enemy, and how to evacuate civilians—all of this can be seen as a supreme test of the personal abilities of commanders on the ground and the organizational capabilities of a nation's armed forces.
A well-organized retreat is exemplified by the classic case of Dunkirk, where hundreds of thousands were brought out of an encirclement, a slightly more tragic outcome resembles the Cherkassy Steel Encirclement, and the most catastrophic are probably those organized by the Nationalist government, such as the Garden Mouth, Zhongtiao Mountain, Nanjing, the burning of Changsha… every time, a bunch of our own got dumped while the enemy hardly lost a hair.
