Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/262



HE 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. And, as everyone knows, the Swiss Republic during the four years of the war, successfully persisted in peace.

Peace! What a strange condition in which to live, Ruth wondered with herself as she encountered the astonishments on every hand when she had crossed the border. She had been in a country at war for not quite three months—unless you nominated America from April, 1917, to January, 1918, a nation at war. Ruth did not. As she thought of her life before she took ship for France, the date of America's declaration of a state of war with the Imperial German government was not fixed in the fiber of her feelings as were many other days before the date of that declaration—the September 6 of the Marne, the May 7 of the Lusitania, the glorious weeks of