Edwin Balmer

“ Gerry strode on with consciousness of these events almost physically pressing upon him. In their presence, what was he with his prejudices and passions, what was that girl who had seared his lips when he pressed them against her fingers so that still for many moments afterwards his lips burned and tingled? If she was a German spy who had been deluding and playing with him, to permit her to proceed now might work further catastrophe incalculable; whereas were she what he believed—yes; he believed—she could do no good but must merely destroy herself if allowed to go on. ”

“ For the instant, as things swam before her in her excitement, there came to Ruth the Cinderella wonder which a girl, who has been really a little child once, can never quite cease to believe—the wonder of a wish by magic made true. The pencils in the beggar’s boxes had been changed by her purchase of them to money for her and a passport to France. And for this magic, Gerry Hull was in some way responsible. She had appealed to him; he had spoken to her and thenceforth all things she touched turned to fairy gold—or better than gold; American bank notes and a passport to France! ”

“ Whether friend or foe, no one on the train could know. Cries reached Ruth from other compartments in the car. Everyone was seeing it as it dropped down now faster and faster, its head burning whiter; its streamer of smoke longer and broader before the stars. The line of roofs and chimneys off to the south, which had shown in glaring silhouette, sucked it from sight. It had crashed; and a shudder shocked through Ruth as she pictured the pilot. She wanted Gerry Hull beside her to know that he was safe; her hand groped in the dark, without her will. ”

“ Her guns were going—one, two, three of them! Ruth could see the gossamer of their gases as they puffed forward and were swept backward; she could hear on the wind the resound of the quick firers. Steadily, rhythmically, relentlessly they rang, beating over the sea like great bells booming in vengeance for the Ribot's dead.
Ruth felt lifted up, glorified as by nothing she had ever known before. She turned to the man who had come up beside her; he was Gerry Hull and, as he looked over the sea at the destroyer, she saw the blood burning red, paling, and burning bright again in his face. ”

“ Rockets streaked above the black city; shells flared and flaked in the air; and the glory of battle grasped Gerry. Grasped O’Malley, too. He patted his machine gun and turned about in his seat, appealing to Gerry.
Above them the Fokkers and the other machines of the German defense were diving and engaging the raiders; a light caught the under wings of a plane and showed Gerry the tricolor circles of the allies. Before it sparks streaked—the illuminated tracer bullets streaming from the machine guns; and toward it, beyond it—now through it—other sparks streaked back. ”

“ She had viewed her first dead slain by a fellowman; and amazing, all overwhelming instincts—an urge to kill, kill in return, kill in punishment, kill in revenge—possessed her. She had not meant to kill before. She had thought of saving life—saving the Belgians from more barbarities, saving the lives of those at sea; she had thought of her task ahead, and of the risks she was to run, as saving the lives of American and British and French soldiers. For the first time she thought of herself as an instrument to kill—kill Germans, many, many Germans ”

“ The vision flowed before Ruth's eyes for an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the Starke or to surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the Ribot and murder more people in their beds and fill the space below decks with the dead and the agonized dying. ”

“ Gerry asked, confidently.
Ruth’s eyes filled suddenly so that she had to raise a hand from the driving-wheel to dash away the wetness which blurred the road.
“They’re the most wonderful sportsmen in the world!” Ruth said. “They don’t care about odds against them; or at least they don’t complain. Oh, that’s not the word; complaint is about as far from their attitude as anything you can think of.”
“I know,” Gerry said.
“They don’t even—criticize. They just accept the odds, whatever they are; and go in with all of themselves as though they had a chance to hold and win and come out alive! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Switzerland, strangely and without warning, had undone much that France and the battle zone had worked within Ruth; the inevitable relaxing of the strain of work in a country at war had returned Ruth to earlier emotions. What was she, Ruth Alden, doing here alone in the Alps? She was standing, as one in a dream, upon the quay before the splendid hotels of Lucerne and gazing over the blue, wonderful, mountain-mirroring waters of the Lac des Quatre Cantons. Off to the southwest, grand and rugged against the azure sky, rose the snow-capped peaks of Pilatus ”

“ They were a great many, it seemed to Ruth—thirty or forty. She had never seen so many suffering people, so many bandages, so much blood before. The ship’s surgeon was moving among them; women were there—quiet, calm, competent women. One had direction of the others and Ruth gazed at her for moments before she recognized Agnes Ertyle with her beautiful, sweet eyes become maturely stern and, at the same time, marvelously compassionate. If Ruth were a man, she must love that girl, she thought; love her now as never before. Ruth looked up to Gerry Hull to see his face when he spoke to Lady Agnes ”

“ Gerry Hull murmured. “Now for another!”
For the Starke, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.
Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew—German men, fifty or eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly, not unlike—in their physical appearance, at least—German-born boys whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. ”

“ But Gerry was satisfied with the one already in position. It gave him Mannheim and—he bent closer to see clearly upon the vibrating surface—the grounds and wood von Fallenbosch and also the speck of the schloss.
The feeling of boundless power, limitless recklessness to dare and do, which flight had first brought to him as a cadet years before, reclaimed him. Flight, that miraculous endowment, was his again. He passed to O'Malley the German pilot's hood; he protected his own eyes with the goggles, and, watching the ground to estimate the wind drift, he set his course by compass for Mannheim. ”

“ She gazed toward the railroad and to the white streak of the road to Lauengratz, upon which, after a few minutes, a motor again passed; more horsemen appeared and more specks of walking men. But through the woods was silence; the axmen, whom she had heard before, began to fell other trees; and the steadiness of the sound brought Ruth reassurance. Whatever search was being made below had not yet disturbed the woodsmen near her. Yet she arose and crept a few hundred yards farther up the mountainside, and under heavier cover, before she dropped to the ground again. ”

“ Then the moment of Ruth, the little girl and the dreamer, was gone; and Ruth, the business woman competent to earn twenty-five dollars a week, examined what she held in her hand. As she made out the papers more clearly, her heart only beat faster and harder; her hands went moist and trembled and her breath was pent in by presence of the great challenge which had come to her, which was not fairy at all but very real and mortal and which put at stake her life and honor but which offered her something to “do” beyond even her dreams. ”

“ She took long breaths of sea air and crept back and called again into the smoke; she thought she heard a man's cry in response; Gerry Hull's voice. She returned to the hole in the side of the ship and let the waves drench her face and her hair; she caught up her skirt and soaked it in the splash of the sea.
The firing of the guns was keeping up all this time; the shock of shells bursting aboard the ship also continued. But the tug and thrust of the single engine had stopped; the vessel vibrated only at the firing of its own guns or at the detonation of a German shell. ”

“ Tomorrow—or perhaps even today—the enemy might take her out and kill her. And while death—her individual, personal annihilation—had become a matter of amazingly small account, yet the recognition that with death must come withdrawal, perhaps, even from knowledge of how the battle was going upon that line where the fate of all the world was at stake, where Britons and French fought as she had seen them fight, and where, at last, America was arriving—that crushed her down to her pallet and with despair quite overwhelmed her. ”

“ Ruth did not follow; and while she lingered beside the bench where he had sat with her, she warned herself that Gerry Hull had paid her attention as a man of his breeding would have paid any girl whom he had been brought out to meet. Then the blood, warm within her, insisted that he had not disliked her; he had even liked her for herself.
The approach of an elderly woman in a gray dress returned Ruth to the realities and the risks of the fraud she had been playing to win Gerry Hull's liking. ”

“ Truce had come—truce which the German pilot in the Fokker alongside signalized by wave of his hand. Gerry raised his hands from his gun lanyard, and, a little dazedly, waved back, and he let the German steer away. Gerry swung his own ship about, and, flying low over an anomalous land of man-specks walking all about in the open, he shut off his motor and came down in his airdrome.
Silence—except for voices and motor noises—silence! And nothing particular to do or to expect; nothing immediately threatening you; death no longer probable. ”

“ Poor chaps who come to me; they've fought so finely for England; and now the Boche are boasting they've whipped them and beaten England. They everyone of them are so eager to get well, and go back, and have at them again, and rather show the Boche that they've not—rather show them that England will have them! Now we'll not be under our own command; yet we'll be fighting just the same for England; the Boche shall find that England will have them!"
"You'll have them!" Gerry assured. "And far quicker than you could have before." ”

“ Do you think I could have done all that I’ve told you I have just for the sake of working here in Paris? Do you think I could see death come to so many and care how it comes to me?”
“It’s not just death,” Gerry said, quivering as he gazed down at her. “If I could be sure they’d just kill you, it might be easier to leave your affairs to you. Who owns the right to refuse another his way to die? But you’re a girl. At first when they may think you one of themselves, you may be safe; but then they’ll discover you. A man—or what passes in Germany for a man—probably will find you out. ”

“ A flare of flame, not sharp and jagged like the burst of shells, nor yet the streak of a rocket, nor like the glaring spot of a signal light, wavered across the stars. Something clouded it—smoke. It flung free from the smoke and dived, flaring bigger and brighter, trailing behind it a streamer of black which blanketed both rockets beyond and the stars; it dived on, burning.
Ruth’s heart throbbed like a hammer in her throat. “Chute d’un aéroplane!” the French women cried.
“Fall of an airplane!” ”

“ The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on the hill. ”

“ Ever since Milicent had informed her that he was in Paris, Ruth had been forming plans for every contingency of their meeting; but this encounter had introduced elements different from any expectations. If this visit to the street of the Holy Fathers was to be his last one before leaving Paris, then perhaps she had better keep him out upon the street in the dark and play at being Cynthia until she could dismiss him. She must feel—or at least she must betray—no recoil of outrage at his taking her into his arms. He had had that right with Cynthia Gail. ”

“ INTO GERMANY THE little Republic of Switzerland, always one of the most interesting spots in the world, became during this war a most amazing and anomalous country. Completely surrounded by four great powers at war—and itself peopled by citizens each speaking the tongue of one or another of its neighbors and each allied by blood with one or with two or with three, or, perhaps, with all—the Swiss Confederation suffered a complex of passions, sympathies, and prejudices quite beyond possible parallel elsewhere. ”

“ Hubert had the window open; and Ruth and the French women were kneeling side by side to look out and up. They could see little lights in the sky now; they could hear, between the smash of shells, the hum of airplane motors and the rattle of brief bursts of machine-gun fire.
Airplanes of defense were up there fighting the Germans—French piloted those machines. But there might be Americans fighting there, too. Ruth had read that once or twice American pilots had been among those honored with the defense of Paris. She did not know whether it was true; she had meant to ask Gerry Hull. ”

“ Several minutes later, when she was far down the road, she gazed back, and saw a combat biplane rise from the field with what seemed to be particular impatience, and she imagined that he was piloting that machine. She had passed now from the zone of the broken front, where all the effort was to throw men—any number and any sort of men—across the path of the victorious German advance to the region of retreat, where every sinew and every sense was strained in the attempt to get men, and guns, and supplies out of the area of envelopment by the enemy. ”