THE English guns began it.
To the world the great battle started with the German onslaught of the morning of that Thursday, the twenty-first of March; but to Ruth, the beginning was with the English guns—the guns of the evening before, rolling and resounding over the Picardy plain.
The night seemed to have embarked upon stillness in its earlier hours. The "line"—that dim, neighboring bulwark descending from the far indefiniteness of the North Sea to approach close to the little hamlet of Mirevaux, to seem indeed to point into Mirevaux but for a twist which turned it away and deflected it, sweeping southward, and east, and south again toward the farther fastness of the Alps—the line had been absolutely quiet. A great many airplanes had been up during the afternoon, Ruth had observed as she gazed toward the line from Mirevaux; their wings had specked the sky of the twilight. When the afterglow was gone and the moon held the heavens, little colored lights flashed frequently before the stars of the east, marking where many night-flying pilots plied on their errands; but these signals seemed at first not to be for the guns. The moon illumined a drowsy Mirevaux, war-ravaged, but rewon, and dreaming itself secure again behind that barrier of earth, and men, and guns, and gas, and airplanes over the slopes of the east which the English held.
And not alone Mirevaux so dreamed. Many persons of far wider information than the French peasants and without the French folks' love of their own home farms to influence them, also imagined Mirevaux quite safe—the hard-headed and quite practical, though impulsive persons who made up a certain American committee for the restoration of war-ravaged lands, had moved, and seconded, and decreed in committee meeting that Mirevaux was definitely and finally removed from the zone of invasion and, therefore, that the committee's representative in Mirevaux should be authorized to expend for temporary and permanent restoration so many thousands of francs a month.
It was the useful expenditure of these sums which had brought Ruth Alden, as assistant and associate to Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, to Mirevaux from Roisel in the first week of March and which, upon the quiet moonlit evening of that Wednesday, the twentieth, detained Ruth at the cottage of old Grandmère Bergues, who with her grandchildren—Victor and petite Marie—had outstayed the German occupation of Mirevaux from August of the first year of the war to the great retreat of February, 1917, when the enemy went back to the Hindenburg line, destroying unremovable property and devastating orchard and farm.
Grand'mère Bergues stood at the door of the little cottage which, last autumn, had been restored as well as obtainable materials permitted. The moon shone down upon what had been an orchard; but the Germans, before their retreat, had systematically sawed through the trunk of each tree till the tree fell. The French, as quickly as possible, had regrafted the top upon the stump and thus had saved a great many trees; and the new buds upon them, showing that these had survived the winter and would bloom and fruit again, brought to Grand'mère Bergues a sense of triumph over the Boche.
Grandmère Bergues needed all the triumph she could feel. Her son, Laurent, lay in one of those white-crossed graves of the defenders of Douaumont at Verdun; her own daughter Mathilde, who had married a merchant of Carnières, which was beyond Cambrai, had not been heard of since the first year of the war. Laurent's wife—well, she had been a young and beautiful woman and Grand'mère Bergues either told nothing of what had been her fate when the Germans came or else she told it again and again in abandon.
"They bound me to the bedpost; and one said—he was a pink-faced pig, with the pink—ugh!—all about his head through his closecropped hair—he said, 'Remove her.'
"'No; it is better to let her see. But keep her quiet!'
"So they stuffed in my mouth . . . ."
Ruth well knew the frightful facts; she knew that, three years ago, there had been little Laurent—a baby—too.
"These things," said Grand'mère Bergues, "you did not believe at first."
"No," Ruth said, "we did not."
"It is not to be wondered at," the old woman said simply. "The wonderful fact is that now you arrive!"
She trudged along beside Ruth through the ruin of the orchard and halted with her hand upon the bough of an apple tree which was one of those that the French had grafted and saved.
"I saw them cut this down; they measure so many centimeters from the ground; they start to saw; they cut so far through; they stop; it is destroyed! Ah, but I shall pluck apples this August, oh, beast pigs, brutes below all others!" she apostrophized quite calmly. "How may those who have the form of men be such fools, too?" she asked Ruth. "When they are here—those who bound me to the bed and their comrades—they say that they would be the friends of France. The English, they say, are our enemies; we shall see! Well, the English are about us now as they have been; and look, I have come of my own will away from Victor and Marie, leaving them alone, sleeping. Such danger now! And you, Mademoiselle, you are younger and as beautiful even as my Laurent's wife—you go on, quite safe, unaccompanied."
Ruth proceeded quite safely, indeed; but not unaccompanied for long. The English, as Grand'mère Bergues said, were all about—a regiment was lying in reserve just then beyond Mirevaux; and a certain young lieutenant, who had been one of the guests at a tea at Mrs. Mayhew's cottage a week ago, was awaiting Ruth upon the road. His name was Haddon-Staples; but he was so like "1582" of the Ribot that Ruth had dubbed him to herself "1583" and she appreciated him hugely.
Hardly had he caught step with her when the guns began—the English guns.
The firing was heavy—no heavier, perhaps, than Ruth often had heard at night during the days near Mirevaux, but tonight it seemed to Ruth to have a more intense, more nervous quality.
"Box barrage, sounds like," Haddon-Staples volunteered when Ruth stopped to study the direction of the action. "Not much on, I should say. Trench raid for information, probably."
"When do you suppose they'll attack?"
They, of course, were the Germans. "Oh, any time. That's what we're out for a bit of a line on tonight—naturally. Sooner they try it, the better, don't you think?"
"You're—we're all ready for them?" Ruth asked.
"Ready as may be," the Englishman returned politely. "They've rather the advantage of us, you know—numerically. A good bit of a farm here again, isn't there?" he shifted the subject, gazing over the level, planted fields.
Ruth talked with him about other things; but her thought remained with those English guns firing and firing, with the English gunners serving them, with the English infantry raiding "for information" or lying in wait for the certain-coming attack of an enemy having a recognized advantage—numerically. The reason that the enemy possessed that advantage was, she knew, that America was not yet in force on the battle line. But for that tardiness, she had not yet heard one word of censure from Englishmen or from the French.
The guns were still going when she went to bed at half-past ten—the English guns with the German guns attempting only ordinary reply. So Ruth slept until a quaking of the ground and a sudden, tremendous new impact of sound sat her up in the darkness, awake. She gazed at her watch; it was half-past four. German guns now were sending the monstrous missiles whose detonation shook the land; it was the English guns which attempted the reply. Ruth went to her window and gazed out in the dark toward the lines until the gray of dawn discovered a thin gray mist over the ground—a mist of the sort making for surprises of attacking forces upon the forces defending; and that frightful fire of the German guns meant that, this morning at last, the Germans were attacking.
Ruth dressed as Mrs. Mayhew and everyone else in the house was dressing. The thunder of the guns, the never-ceasing concussion of the bursting shells rolled louder and nearer.
"That must be the start of their offensive," Mrs. Mayhew said. "Let them try; they'll never get through!"
"No," Ruth said; and she believed it. She thought of the German attacks upon Ypres in the early years of the war; of their failure at Verdun last year and the slow progress of the allies when they had been on the offensive—the French in Champagne and the English on the Somme. The others also believed it.
"What will you be about today, dear?" Mrs. Mayhew asked Ruth.
"Oh!"—Ruth needed the moment of the exclamation to recollect. "I'm going to Aubigny to see that our last lot of portable houses got there all right and that the people know how to put them up."
"Then come with me; I'm going to Ham," Mrs. Mayhew 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!
Ruth went sick when she saw them. She thought of Hubert, her gentle-minded, sensitive Hubert, now helping to handle men so hurt. She thought of Agnes Ertyle when she saw English women, as well as English men, receiving the forms from the ambulances at the great casualty clearing stations where new rows of tents hastily were going up. She thought, of course, of Gerry Hull. She believed that he was far removed from this zone of battle; but she did not yet know—no one yet knew—how far the fighting front was extending. He might be flying at this moment over a front most heavily involved; she knew that he would wish to be; and how he would fight—fight as never before and without regard of himself to check disaster due, as he would believe, to the tardiness of his country.
She saw a boy in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps lying upon a stretcher in the sunshine; he was smoking, but he took his cigarette from his lips to smile at her as she gazed down at him.
British troops—strong, young, uninjured men—marching in battalions; English guns and ammunition lorries; more English infantry and guns poured into the streets of the city, passed through them and on to the front and more came. The wounded from the front and the French folk from the farms and villages passed on their way to the rear; but no one else came back.
"The line is steadying itself; it's holding," the rumor ran in Ham during the afternoon. "The Boche gained at first—everyone on the offensive gains at first—but now we're holding them; we're slaughtering them as they come on." Then more alarming reports spread. "They've overrun the first lines at points; but the others are holding or are sure to—the Boche are doing better than at Verdun." Then that was denied. "They're not doing so well. We're holding them now. They're coming on. They're driving us back."
Not even the wounded and the refugees, still streaming from the front, brought reliable report; the battle was too immense for that. And into the battle, English reinforcements steadily went forward. So Ruth was sure only, that the great battle, which the world had been awaiting, was begun; she could know nothing of the true fortune of that first tremendous day. She was finding, however, that Mrs. Mayhew and she could not go about their work of restoration. They turned their car upon the road and, inviting refugees, they carried the peasants swift miles along the roads which they had been trudging; let them off ten miles or so to the rear and returned for more.
But they urged no one to flee; they simply assisted those already in flight and who would not be turned back. And that evening, which was more quiet than the evening before—or at least it seemed so in comparison to the day—they returned to Mirevaux. The worst was past, they believed; the line, the English and the French line which for more than three years had stood and held against the Germans, had reformed and reestablished itself after the first shake of the tremendous onslaught.
And so it still seemed to those in Mirevaux that next morning of Friday when, after breakfast, Ruth discussed again with Mrs. Mayhew what she would do that day. They were agreeing that they should be calm and show confidence and go about their work as usual, when they heard the hoofs of a galloping horse upon the road. The rider pulled up short before their cottage and Ruth, running to the door, saw "1583"—the English officer who had waited for her upon the road from Grand'mère Bergues' the night before last.
"They've broken through!" he called to Ruth.
"Through!" Ruth cried. "The Germans!"
"We can't hold them! They're coming on! Fifty thousand of them! They've broken through—through! We couldn't hold them!"
Ruth recoiled upon the door. Mrs. Mayhew was beside her, calling out to the officer; but he, having given the alarm to that house, was going on. Ruth gazed vacantly over the smooth, replowed, replanted French fields and the rows of grafted orchard trees toward Grand'mère Bergues'; and her mind gave her, in a flash, vision of the broken dam of the English line with the German flood bursting through; and before that flood she saw again the refugees of yesterday in flight; she saw Grand'mère Bergues with petite Marie and Victor caught again, perhaps; she saw the wounded on the roads and in the tents of the clearing stations, cut off by the Germans and taken; she saw the English troops—the strong, young men whom she had witnessed marching to the front yesterday battling bravely, desperately, but shot down, bayoneted and overrun.
"They've broken through. We couldn't hold them! They're coming on!"
Ruth gazed from the ground to the sky and she saw—not in her fancy but visually above her now—airplanes, allied airplanes flying in squadrons from the rear toward that front which she could not see but where, she knew, the line on the ground was broken and gone and where the Germans, who were "coming on," must be pouring through. And her mind showed her in the pilot's seat of one of those airplanes—or in one just like them somewhere on that broken front—Gerry Hull. Vividly she fancied his face as he flew to fight and to make up, as well as one man might, for the millions of his people who should have been yesterday and today upon that broken battle line where the enemy, at last, had broken through!
Ruth could not know then all that a break "through" meant; no one could know; for in all the fighting in France, no army had broken "through" before. She could know only that upon her, as an American quite as much as Gerry Hull, was the charge to do her uttermost.
But what was she to do?
Gerry, arriving that morning at the airdrome to which he had been ordered, possessed the advantage over her of no uncertainty but of definite assignment to duty.
During his training and his service with the French, he had piloted many sorts of machines. He had flown the reconnaissance and photographic biplanes with duty merely to bring back information of the enemy's movements; he had flown the bombing machines entrusted with destruction, by aerial torpedo, of batteries, and ammunition dumps behind the enemy's front; he had flown the "artillery machines"—the biplanes with wireless by which he, or his observer, signaled to the French batteries the fall of their shots and guided the guns to the true targets; he had flown, as all the world knew, the swift-darting avions de chasse—the airplanes of pursuit—the Nieuports and the Spads in which, as combat pilot, he had dueled ten thousand feet up in the sky with the German combat pilots and shot some twenty of them down. And it was while he was still in the French service that the flying men began to form new squadrons for strange service distinct from mere bomb-dropping, from guiding guns or sending back information or from fighting other airplanes. Pilots of these squadrons started to attack, by bomb and machine guns, the enemy infantry and artillery and horse. They had special, new "ships" made for them—one-seater or two-seater biplanes mounting two or three machine guns and built to stand the strain of diving down from a height and "flattening out" suddenly only a few yards from the ground while the pilot with his machine guns raked the ranks of troops over which he flew.
It was in one of these new raiding airplanes, accordingly, and as leader of a flight that Gerry Hull was going to battle this day. The field, from which he had arisen, had been far back of the English lines—so far back, indeed, that it still was secure as Gerry guided his flight of six machines up into the clear spring sunshine. His was one of the single-seaters; he was alone, therefore, as he led on to the north and east; and he was glad this morning to be alone. The exaltation which almost always pervaded him as he rose into the sky with his motor running powerfully and true, possessed him at its most this morning; it brought to him, together with the never-dulling wonder of his endowment of wings and his multiplied strength therefrom, a despite of fate which made him reckless yet calm.
His altimeter told that he had climbed to some four thousand feet and content with that height and flying level, he glanced about and saw that the machines which followed him were flattening out too and in position. He gazed at his mapboard where was displayed chart of the land below with notation of the battle line—such battle line as still existed—corrected up to the last hour by photographs and visual observations made by other pilots that morning. It was the strip of ravaged and restored land over which he was flying; clearly he could see the cross-streaked spots of the cities; on his right, Ham; on his left, Péronne and Roisel. Roads spider-webbed about them; tiny villages clustered. Immediately below he could see even, decent patches of planted fields, gardens, meadows; he could make out, too, more minute objects—the peasants' cottages and their trees, the tiny roofs of the new portable houses supplied by the Americans.
He could see the specks which were people upon the roads, gathered in groups moving together; where the specks formed into a long, ordered line, he knew that they were troops and moving toward the battle, probably. He himself was flying so fast that the direction of the slow movement upon the roads could not appear; but he could guess that the irregular series of specks were refugees in flight. Shells were smashing beside them—shrapnel, high explosive, and gas. He could recognize easily the puff of the shrapnel distinct from the burst of the high explosive shells. He could not distinguish the gas shells; but he knew that the Germans were using them, deluging with gas the zone behind the battle to a depth unknown before.
He gazed forward to the ground where the German infantry now was advancing—ground sloping so slightly hereabouts that, but for the shadows, it would have seemed flat. But the morning sun of March was still circling low, making all bright a strip where shells, in enormous number, erupted; just short of this strip, the sunlight ceased sharply in a shadow which did not move; the bright strip therefore was the eastern slope of a hill and the shadow was its western descent—a slope where, at this moment, the English must be attempting a stand.
Gerry gazed to the right to try to find and, with his eyes, follow the line which ran from this hill; but he could discover none; he glanced to the left and failed there also to discern support for the English soldiers on the hill. Surely there must have been support of some sort thereabouts; but the Germans had overwhelmed or swept it back. Germans—German infantry in mass, Germans deployed, German guns engaged and German guns moving forward followed by their trains—Germans possessed the ground before that sunlit slope and on its right and left.
He looked farther away to the south and to the north; and he could witness the truth which already he had been told. The "line," in the sense in which one had known the line for three years, was swept away—first, second, third, and all supporting systems of defense; attempts to form new lines behind the old had failed. Open field battle, swift and Napoleonic, was established; for this battle the Germans had gathered men by the hundred thousands, guns by the thousand while the English here had—well the remnants of brigades and divisions which here and there held to the slope of a hill.
Gerry wondered, as he gazed down, whether these men on the nearest slope knew that—already half surrounded—there was no support behind them. He was steering lower as he neared them, drawing to himself a shell or two from some German anti-aircraft gun which he did not trouble to try to place. Airplanes appeared all about him now, above, before, behind, and on both sides; but they were, most of them, English or French; here and there he glimpsed a German machine; but none of these approached him to attack. For if the ground that morning was the Germans', the air was the allies'; it was only from the air, from him and his flight of five machines trailing behind him and from other similar flights of fighting airplanes likewise arriving, that any help could reach those English about to be attacked.
For the storm of German shells, which a few seconds before had been sweeping the slope, lifted suddenly; before the hill and from the flank, specks which were German storm troops moved forward; and Gerry, turning his head, saw that the other machines followed him in position. In signal to them, he rocked his ship a little. Steadying again, he leaned forward and saw that his machine guns were ready; softly he touched the release levers of his bombs. His hands went back to his controls and, gazing below at the German ranks again, he put the nose of his machine down and dived.
Ordinarily, during the tremendous seconds of the drop, he could see nothing but the spot of earth at which his eyes were focused, leaping up and up at him; ordinarily, sensation stopped with the feeling of fall and the rush of that seeming suck of destruction. But now his senses took in many things. His eyes never lost the swelling specks of gray which were becoming German storm troops leaping to the attack; but his eyes took in, too, the file of forms in English brown lying waiting over the crest of the hill.
They were scattered and few—very, very few, he saw; fewer even than he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two thousand feet higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among the holders of the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that the many, many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped down above them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing together in little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine, drawing together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last desperate defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it.
The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant.