“Alone?” Gerry laughed. “Lay your eggs, old hawk! Lay your eggs; and two’s a crowd for that castle tonight! The only danger’s getting lost in the halls! But in case someone shows, lend us your pistol—we have one. Then lay your eggs—close but not on; and keep flying above ten minutes more!”
The occupants of the Schloss von Fallenbosch all had been aroused many minutes earlier by the burst of the first bombs in the city. The detonations, followed immediately by the alarm and by the sound of the anti-aircraft guns replying, had sent the citizens of Mannheim scurrying to their cellars. The allied raiders never attacked intentionally the dwelling places of the city; their objectives were solely the chemical and munition works; but the German population—knowing how their own flyers bombed open cities indiscriminately—always expected similar assaults upon themselves. Moreover, they well knew the difficulties of identifying objectives from high in the air and the greater difficulty of confining attack to a limited area; then there were the machine-gun bullets from the aerial battle and the bits of shrapnel showering back upon the city.
But the schloss heretofore had been quite removed from attack; it was far enough from the city to be in small danger from the falling shells of the high angle guns. So Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch and his aids, his wife and his servants, when roused merely went to their windows and watched the sky curiously and without idea of personal danger. If they thought at all about the prisoner confined in the cell in the old wing of the schloss it was to consider her quite securely held; she, too, was roused, undoubtedly, and listening to the sounds which told that pilots from the allied forces were fighting within a mile or two. But what could she hope from them?
Ruth, indeed, was aroused. This night was the first since she had been taken, upon which the allies had attacked at Mannheim; but she had recognized the distinctive sounds—distant but tremendous—which told of a raid. Her window was open but for its bars, and its height in the wall, instead of interfering, facilitated inspection of the sky.
It gave her view over only a limited quadrilateral, of course, but every few seconds something happened in that space—shells burst, or a searchlight swept across, or a rocket flared—more than enough to make her sure that a real attack was on. Once she had a glimpse of an airplane upon which a searchlight glared and about which shrapnel burst; that meant she had seen a French, or English, or an American machine!
To her, who was about to die, the sight was enormously exciting. Not that it brought her shadow of hope for herself. For the first five days following her capture she had been kept shut up in her cell, seeing only the man who brought her food and refused any right of access to anyone else.
At the end of the five days she had been led before a military court of three men—von Fallenbosch and two other officers—who accused, tried, and sentenced her without permitting her any semblance of defense; she was led back and locked up again awaiting the day for the execution of the death penalty, which had been left to the discretion or the whim of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch.
Her end might come, therefore, upon any day, or upon any hour, and without warning; it might not come for weeks or months; her execution might not, indeed, occur at all. But a more terrible suspense of sentence scarcely could be devised. Its purpose ostensibly was to make her disclose facts which the Germans believed that she knew. Of course they had held inquisition of her immediately upon capture and several times since, but without satisfactory result; so they kept her locked up. For reading matter she was supplied with German newspapers.
These proclaimed with constantly increasing boastfulness the complete triumph of the German arms. Everywhere the Germans had attacked, the allies had crumpled, fleeing in disorder, leaving guns by the hundred, prisoners by the tens of thousands. One more stroke and all would be over! Prince Ruprecht would be on the channel; the Crown Prince would be in Paris!
Ruth had seen German newspapers before and she had known of their blatant distortions of truth, but she had never seen anything like the vaunts of those days. These must have, she feared, much foundation in fact. Visions of catastrophe to the British Fifth Army, of the rout from the Hindenburg line almost to Amiens, and the terrors of the retreat haunted her in her solitary days. Was it possible that the English were completely crushed and that the French were helpless? Possible that the American army, which now was admitted to have arrived in some force, had proved so utterly unfit for European warfare that the allies dared not send it into the battle line?