Ruth herself was passed on the next day and requisitioned by other men. Then she was taken to Paris and was left, undisturbed by further examinations, to rest in a bed in a little private room at one of the hospitals. She could not quite determine, during those first days that she was detained there, whether she was in fact under a sort of observational arrest or whether the constant care which she received was solely to promote the return of her strength.
For a semi-collapse had come—collapse of only physical powers. Her mind was ceaselessly active—too active, the doctor told her. Sometimes at night she could not sleep, but demanded that she be allowed to rise, and dress, and go to the intelligence officers, or have them come to her, so she could tell them her whole story again in a way they must believe.
If she could only make them see how Adler had looked; if she could make them hear how his voice had sounded when he had spoken of that Soissons-Reims front, they would not doubt her at all. If she could speak with Gerry Hull again, perhaps he could help make them believe her. But Gerry Hull was with his squadron. Only women were about Ruth now, and doctors, and wounded men. So, day after day, she was kept in bed awaiting the attack which—as all the world knows—came on the twenty-seventh of May and against the French on the front from Soissons to Reims.
The day the great assault began Ruth demanded to get up, and—it seemed until that day that someone must have doubted her—at last she was permitted to do as she pleased. So she returned to the Rue des Saints Pères and to her old rooms with Milicent; she wore again the khaki uniform which she had worn in Picardy; and, after reading the communiques that night, she applied for active duty as an ambulance driver.
That day the Germans had swept the French, in one single rush, from the Chemin des Dames; the enemy were over the Aisne. Back, back; everywhere the French, as the British in Picardy, were driven back, yielding guns by the hundred, prisoners by the tens of thousands. The Boche were over the Vesle now; they had Fismes. God! Again they were upon the Marne! Could nothing stop them? Still they were rushing onward, a broken army before them.
Ruth was in Paris, where talk of a sort which she had never heard in France before was upon everyone’s lips. France had given all and the Germans yet advanced. Their guns hourly roared louder. Four years ago, to be sure, their guns were heard as plainly in the Paris streets; four years ago the German field gray had come even closer; four years ago the government had abandoned Paris and prepared, even though Paris were taken, to fight and fight. But that was four years ago and the French army was young and unspent; Britain, then, had barely begun to come in. France had gathered all her strength, and, in her mighty hour at the Marne, had hurled back the enemy, “saving” Paris!
What mockery was that memory this day! Here, after the four years and the spending of French and British strength, the Germans were at the gates again only more numerous and more confident than before.
Ruth stayed alone in her room during a lone afternoon writing to Cynthia Gail’s father and mother a full confession of all that she had done. Her whole enterprise, so hopefully taken up, had failed, she said. She related what she had tried to do; indeed, in defense of herself, she related how she had succeeded in entering Germany and in learning something of the German plan for the great drive which was now overwhelming the world; but she had failed to bring back any proof which was required to convince the army that the information she had gained was dependable. So she felt that she had played Cynthia Gail’s part for no gain; she had no great achievement to offer Cynthia’s parents in recompense for the wrong which she had done them.
She sealed and posted this, and now, at last, wrote to her own mother fully of what she had done. Again the despair of the day seized her. She wandered the streets where men—men who had not been in the fighting during the four years—were talking of the allies taking up a new line south of Paris and holding on there somehow until America was ready. But when such talk went about Ruth gazed at the eyes of the French who had been through the years of battle; and she knew that, if the Germans won now, the French could do no more.
Ever increasing streams of the wounded were flowing back into Paris; and through the capital began spreading the confusion of catastrophe nearby. The mighty emergency made demand upon the services of those refused only a few hours earlier; and Ruth left Paris that night upon the driving seat of a small ambulance. The next morning—it was the first of June—she was close to the guns and upon a road where was retreat.