He and she, and the rest, were going back--back, kilometer after kilometer and yet encountering no strong force of English or French in position to hold that land; and he knew that if that depth of front was being abandoned as far away to the right and as far away to the left as he could see, resistance must have broken down over a much greater front. Indeed, Gerry had himself observed from his airplane something of the length of the line where the allies were retreating; but he had not been able, when in the air, and passing in a few seconds over a kilometer, to feel the disaster as now he felt it in the swaying seat of the half-wrecked truck creeping along at the head of a column of refugees. This land which the Germans were again overrunning in a day was the strip which the English had freed the year before only through the long, murderous months of the “blood baths” of the Somme. “Do you remember an English officer on the _Ribot_,” Ruth was asking of him, “whom I called ‘1582?’” “He’s about here?” Gerry inquired. “No; but several of his sort are--one particularly, a Lieutenant Haddon-Staples; I called him, to myself, ‘1583.’” “What do you think of his sort now?” Gerry asked, confidently. Ruth’s eyes filled suddenly so that she had to raise a hand from the driving-wheel to dash away the wetness which blurred the road. “They’re the most wonderful sportsmen in the world!” Ruth said. “They don’t care about odds against them; or at least they don’t complain. Oh, that’s not the word; complaint is about as far from their attitude as anything you can think of.” “I know,” Gerry said. “They don’t even--criticize. They just accept the odds, whatever they are; and go in with all of themselves as though they had a chance to hold and win and come out alive! They know they haven’t; but you’d never guess it from them; and there’s none of that ‘We who are about to die salute you’ idea in them either. They’re sportsmen and gentlemen!” “I know how they make you feel,” Gerry said, watching her keenly again; the road thereabouts was bad and she couldn’t even glance around to him. “Rather, you know now how they made me feel, I think.” She made no reply; so he went on. “If they’d say things out to us; if they had criticized us and damned us and told us we were lying down behind them, it wouldn’t be so rotten hard to see them. But they don’t. They just go in as you say; they feel they’ve a fight on which is their fight and they’re going to fight it whether anyone else thinks it worth while to fight it or not or whether they have any chance for winning.” Ruth winked swiftly again to clear her eyes; and Gerry, watching her, wondered what particular experience his general praise had called up. He did not ask; but she told him. “‘1583’ was just that sort of man, Gerry,” she said, using his name for the first time as simply as he had spoken hers when she had crouched behind the shield of his engine with him. “He’s killed?” Gerry asked.