Returning that night to his squadron at the front, he wrote her an apology; but, after reading it over, tore it up. His squadron was stationed far to the east and south of Roisel; and there was at that time nothing in the military situation to give him greater concern for that particular sector. Yet when news arrived he scanned it quickly for report of operations about Roisel. However, though he twice got leave of a day, he did not on either occasion penetrate farther into Picardy than the little city where Lady Agnes now lived.

All along the front, from Switzerland to the sea, the calm continued; but few on either side of that line held illusions as to the nature of that calm. Then, as all the world knows, suddenly upon a morning the storm broke.

Gerry Hull received the bulletins which came over the military wire which brought him also his orders. These orders were for his squadron at once to move and report for service at the earliest possible moment at a certain point in Picardy—which orders, as orders usually go, were unexplained except as the news bulletins gave them meaning.

The news, however, left no loopholes for doubt. The great German assault, which had begun the morning before, already had developed a complete break-through of the British front. The Germans, in one tremendous dash, had overrun the first lines of defense, the second, and the third; they were advancing now in open country with only remnants of an army before them; and the center of this huge wave of the enemy advance was what had been the French village of Roisel.

CHAPTER X
THE GREAT ATTACK

The English guns began it.

To the world the great battle started with the German onslaught of the morning of that Thursday, the twenty-first of March; but to Ruth, the beginning was with the English guns—the guns of the evening before, rolling and resounding over the Picardy plain.

The night seemed to have embarked upon stillness in its earlier hours. The “line”—that dim, neighboring bulwark descending from the far indefiniteness of the North Sea to approach close to the little hamlet of Mirevaux, to seem indeed to point into Mirevaux but for a twist which turned it away and deflected it, sweeping southward, and east, and south again toward the farther fastness of the Alps—the line had been absolutely quiet. A great many airplanes had been up during the afternoon, Ruth had observed as she gazed toward the line from Mirevaux; their wings had specked the sky of the twilight. When the afterglow was gone and the moon held the heavens, little colored lights flashed frequently before the stars of the east, marking where many night-flying pilots plied on their errands; but these signals seemed at first not to be for the guns. The moon illumined a drowsy Mirevaux, war-ravaged, but rewon, and dreaming itself secure again behind that barrier of earth, and men, and guns, and gas, and airplanes over the slopes of the east which the English held.

And not alone Mirevaux so dreamed. Many persons of far wider information than the French peasants and without the French folks’ love of their own home farms to influence them, also imagined Mirevaux quite safe—the hard-headed and quite practical, though impulsive persons who made up a certain American committee for the restoration of war-ravaged lands, had moved, and seconded, and decreed in committee meeting that Mirevaux was definitely and finally removed from the zone of invasion and, therefore, that the committee’s representative in Mirevaux should be authorized to expend for temporary and permanent restoration so many thousands of francs a month.

It was the useful expenditure of these sums which had brought Ruth Alden, as assistant and associate to Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, to Mirevaux from Roisel in the first week of March and which, upon the quiet moonlit evening of that Wednesday, the twentieth, detained Ruth at the cottage of old Grand’mère Bergues, who with her grandchildren—Victor and petite Marie—had outstayed the German occupation of Mirevaux from August of the first year of the war to the great retreat of February, 1917, when the enemy went back to the Hindenburg line, destroying unremovable property and devastating orchard and farm.