Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/242

 At this moment when, for the cause of her country and its allies, she had determined that she must make the attempt to go on to Germany, the Germans were ready to have her. And that was easy to understand; she had spent weeks going about freely behind the newly formed English and French lines which bagged back about the immense salient which the Germans had thrust toward Amiens; she was supposed, as a German, to have ready report about the strength of those lines as seen from the rear, of the strength of the support, the morale of soldiers and civilians and the thousand other details which the enemy desired to know.

So Ruth went early that morning to the United States Consul General with her passport which long ago had been substituted for that ruined passport of Cynthia Gail's; and she offered it for visé, asking permission to leave Paris and France for a visit to the neutral country of Switzerland, and, more particularly, to Lucerne. She stated that the object of her journey was rest and recuperation; she knew that, not infrequently in the recent months, American girls who had been working near the war zones had been permitted vacations in Switzerland; but she found that times were different now. She encountered no expressed suspicion and no discourtesy; she simply was informed that in the present crisis it was impossible to act immediately upon such requests. Her application would be filed and passed upon in due time; and a clerk questioned Ruth concerning the war service which she had rendered which was supposed to have so exhausted her that she desired rest in Switzerland.

Ruth, hot with shame, perforce related what she had