Ruth leaped up and screamed aloud with joy.
“What is it, Mademoiselle?” one of the dazed poilus inquired.
“The Americans are coming! Our men are here! Our Americans! The Yanks—the Yanks are coming!” she shouted it in the rhythm of the song.
What had seized her that day upon the Ribot when she saw the Starke come up and Gerry told her it was American; what had thrilled through her that night she arrived in France; what had stirred throughout her that morning near Mirevaux when the English officer called out to her, “Good old America,” and she watched the English march off to die; what had come when the French at last arrived before Amiens; even that ecstasy of the bombs bursting over Mannheim when she had sung The Star-Spangled Banner and Gerry Hull had found her; all those together surged through her combined and intensified a thousand-fold.
And this came not to her alone. It had come, too, to the French—the French who had been falling back in flight—yes, in flight, one could say it now—knowing that the Americans were behind them, but expecting nothing of those Americans. Why they had expected nothing, they did not know. At this moment it was incredible that—only the instant before—they had been in total despair.
The Yanks are coming; the Yanks are coming!
They were marines who were coming; they were so close that Ruth could see their uniforms; American marines, who marched past her singing—swinging—on their way to kill and to die! For they were going to kill—and to die. They knew it; that was why they sang as they did; that was why they were so sure—so boastfully, absolutely sure!
... send the word; send the word to beware!
It was American; nothing else! No other men in the world could have gone by so absolutely sure of themselves, singing—swinging—like that. And oh, Ruth loved them! Her people; only a few, indeed, as men were reckoned in this war; but such men! Still singing—swinging—they swept by, drawing after them a vortex of the French, who, a few moments before, had been abandoning the battle. They were all past now, the Americans; oh, how few they had been to face the German army with Paris and all the fate of France behind them.
A few miles on—it could not have been farther—the Americans met the Germans; and what they did there in the woods near the tiny town of Meaux came to Ruth in wonderful fashion. The battle, which each hour—each moment through that terrible morning—had been steadily coming nearer and nearer; the battle ceased to approach. There was no doubt about it! The fighting, furious twice over and then more furious, simply could not get closer. Now the battle was going back! The marines—the American marines, sent in to stop the gap and hold the Paris road—had not merely delayed the Prussian advance; they had halted it and turned it back!