And so it still seemed to those in Mirevaux that next morning of Friday when, after breakfast, Ruth discussed again with Mrs. Mayhew what she would do that day. They were agreeing that they should be calm and show confidence and go about their work as usual, when they heard the hoofs of a galloping horse upon the road. The rider pulled up short before their cottage and Ruth, running to the door, saw “1583”—the English officer who had waited for her upon the road from Grand’mère Bergues’ the night before last.
“They’ve broken through!” he called to Ruth.
“Through!” Ruth cried. “The Germans!”
“We can’t hold them! They’re coming on! Fifty thousand of them! They’ve broken through—through! We couldn’t hold them!”
Ruth recoiled upon the door. Mrs. Mayhew was beside her, calling out to the officer; but he, having given the alarm to that house, was going on. Ruth gazed vacantly over the smooth, replowed, replanted French fields and the rows of grafted orchard trees toward Grand’mère Bergues’; and her mind gave her, in a flash, vision of the broken dam of the English line with the German flood bursting through; and before that flood she saw again the refugees of yesterday in flight; she saw Grand’mère Bergues with petite Marie and Victor caught again, perhaps; she saw the wounded on the roads and in the tents of the clearing stations, cut off by the Germans and taken; she saw the English troops—the strong, young men whom she had witnessed marching to the front yesterday—battling bravely, desperately, but shot down, bayoneted and overrun.
“They’ve broken through. We couldn’t hold them! They’re coming on!”
Ruth gazed from the ground to the sky and she saw—not in her fancy but visually above her now—airplanes, allied airplanes flying in squadrons from the rear toward that front which she could not see but where, she knew, the line on the ground was broken and gone and where the Germans, who were “coming on,” must be pouring through. And her mind showed her in the pilot’s seat of one of those airplanes—or in one just like them somewhere on that broken front—Gerry Hull. Vividly she fancied his face as he flew to fight and to make up, as well as one man might, for the millions of his people who should have been yesterday and today upon that broken battle line where the enemy, at last, had broken through!
Ruth could not know then all that a break “through” meant; no one could know; for in all the fighting in France, no army had broken “through” before. She could know only that upon her, as an American quite as much as Gerry Hull, was the charge to do her uttermost.
But what was she to do?
Gerry, arriving that morning at the airdrome to which he had been ordered, possessed the advantage over her of no uncertainty but of definite assignment to duty.