“‘My friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve not one now. You fancy you’re attached to a place; but you find, you know, you’ve cared for more than that.’ Then he changed the subject the way the English always do when you come to something they feel. He was with me the evening this battle began; and he knew what was coming. I didn’t see him again till this morning--early this morning,” she repeated as though unable to believe the shortness of the time. “He rode over to warn us; and then, a little later when I was getting my first party of people out of Mirevaux, I passed him with some more men just like him going to the firing. He knew he was going to be killed for he’d told us the Germans had broken through; and we couldn’t hold them. But he wasn’t thinking about that when he saw me. He just watched me as I was working to get my people in order and, as he rode past, he called out, ‘Good old America!’ That to me--one girl getting peasants out of a village while he and his handful of soldiers were going--there!” Ruth gestured back toward the battle. “Oh, I wanted to be a million men for him--for them! ‘Good old America!’ he said. I saw him, or men whom I think he was with, holding a hill a couple of miles east an hour later; they were one to ten or one to twenty; I don’t know what the odds were against them; but they stayed on top of that hill. I tell you I saw them--stay on top of that hill.” “I know,” Gerry said. “I’ve seen them stay on top of a hill. I know how it is to want to be, for them, a million men!” Ruth’s hands on the steering-wheel went bloodless from pressure. “Our million is coming; thank God, it’s coming! And I believe--I must believe that somehow it still is right and best that we couldn’t come before.” She gazed back over the land where the Germans were advancing; and where the English soldiers were “staying.” “How could this happen, this break-through?” she asked. “It wasn’t just superior numbers; they’ve had that and, at other times, we’ve had superiority before; but no one ever advanced like this.” “They showed an entirely new attack,” Gerry said. “New infantry formation; new arms--infantry cannon; then there was the mist. And our intelligence people must have fallen down, too, while theirs gave them everything they wanted. We didn’t know at all what they were going to do, but they must have known everything about our strength, or lack of strength, here.” He saw her hands whiten again with their grasp of the wheel and the little lines deepen under her tight-drawn lips. She had stiffened as though he had accused her; and while he was wondering why, she glanced up at him. “Then part of this--” her gaze had gone again to the fields being abandoned--“is my fault, Gerry.” That was all she said; but instantly he thought of her accusation of De Trevenac and what she had told him in the little parlor on the Rue des Saints Pères; and he was so certain that she was thinking of it also that he asked: