Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/204

 "Milicent's kept our room in the pension on the Rue des Saints Pères. I'll be with her again, I think."

"All right! Look out for yourself!"

"You try to, too!"

She kept the car standing a few seconds longer watching him while, with his arm about the old man's shoulder, he hobbled toward the flying field. 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. And dreadful and appalling as it had been to witness men—too few men and unsupported—moving forward to immolate themselves in hopeless effort to stay that German advance, yet it had not been so terrible to Ruth as this sight and sound of retreat. For the sound—the beat of feet upon the road, the ceaseless tramp of retreating men, the rumble of guns and combat trains going back, then the beat, beat, beat of the retreat—continued into the darkness, when Ruth no longer could see the road from the little house where she rested. All through the night it continued till it seemed to Ruth, not something human, but a cataclysm of nature flowing before a more mighty catastrophe which no one and nothing could stop.