Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/165

 hew offered, and during the morning, quite as usual, they drove off together in Mrs. Mayhew's car about their business of helping rehouse and shelter and refurnish the peasants of Picardy.

While they rode in the bright morning sunshine for the mist was cleared now—guns, English guns emplaced far behind the lines and whose presence they had never suspected before, thundered out; their concussion added to the trembling of the ground; and through the air swept sounds—swift, shrill, and ominous—not heard on the days before.

"Shells?" Mrs. Mayhew asked.

Ruth nodded. She had heard the shriek of the shells which had missed the Ribot and passed over. "Shells, I think," she said. They were passing peasants on the road now—families of peasants or such relics of families as the war had left; some, who had a horse, drove a wagon heaped high with the new household goods which they had gained since the invasion; some pushed barrows; others bore bundles only.

Ruth, who was driving, halted the car again and again.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"We do not know," the peasants answered.

Ruth drove on into the little city of Ham, where ambulances bearing the English wounded were arriving in an endless line from the front. Mrs. Mayhew had seen wounded men—many, many of them—in the Paris hospitals; Ruth too had seen wounded—almost two score of people variously hurt aboard the Ribot. But here they came, not as blessés arrived in Paris, but from the battle field and, not by scores, but by hundreds, by thousands!