Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/200

 peasants out of a village while he and his handful of soldiers were going—there!" Ruth gestured back toward the battle. "Oh, I wanted to be a million men for him for them! 'Good old America!' he said. I saw him, or men whom I think he was with, holding a hill a couple of miles east an hour later; they were one to ten or one to twenty; I don't know what the odds were against them; but they stayed on top of that hill. I tell you saw them—stay on top of that hill."

"I know," Gerry said. "I've seen them stay on top of a hill. I know how it is to want to be, for them, a million men!"

Ruth's hands on the steering-wheel went bloodless from pressure. "Our million is coming; thank God, it's coming! And I believe—I must believe that somehow it still is right and best that we couldn't come before." She gazed back over the land where the Germans were advancing; and where the English soldiers were "staying."

"How could this happen, this break-through?" she asked. "It wasn't just superior numbers; they've had that and, at other times, we've had superiority before; but no one ever advanced like this."

"They showed an entirely new attack," Gerry said. "New infantry formation; new arms—infantry cannon; then there was the mist. And our intelligence people must have fallen down, too, while theirs gave them everything they wanted. We didn't know at all what they were going to do, but they must have known everything about our strength, or lack of strength, here."

He saw her hands whiten again with their grasp of the