To withdraw, back down, or reverse course, usually without delay. The term comes from the military practice of sounding drums to recall troops behind the lines, or to some other position. In earlier days wind instruments, most often trumpets, were used for this purpose. Among the references to this practice is “Thai had blawen the ratret,” in John Barbour’s The Bruce (1375). Much later the expression was used figuratively to mean the same as the simple verb to retreat, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, it became a cliché. A newer version is to beat a strategic retreat, basically a euphemism for a forced withdrawal. It came into use during World War I, as the German high command’s explanation of retiring from the Somme in 1917. In the civilian vocabulary, it came to mean yielding a point or backing down from a position in an argument.