That night nothing else occurred; nor upon the next day and night, nor during the following week did Ruth hear from Gerry as to what he had done about her; and she encountered nothing to indicate his decision until, calling again about her request for travel in Switzerland, suddenly she found permission granted, whereupon she took the first train for the east of France and the next morning passed the border into Switzerland. Accordingly it was in the shadow of Mount Pilatus that she read in a Bern newspaper that three days previously the American ace, Gerry Hull, had been shot down while flying over the German lines; but that his companions in the flight, who had returned, reported that, though falling in enemy territory, he seemed to have succeeded in making some sort of a landing; so it was possible that he was not killed but might be a prisoner in the hands of the Germans. CHAPTER XVI: INTO GERMANY The 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 the defense of Verdun. The war declaration of April 6, 1917, seemed now to Ruth but a sort of official notification of the intentions of the American people which since then had only continued to develop. That home country which she had left in the last days of January was not nearly so different from its peace-time self as war-time France had proved distinct from war-time America. Certainly Ruth’s life had run on almost unchanged by the American declaration of war, save for the strengthening of her futile, stifled passions. But that day in January, which had embarked her for France, had ushered her into a realm which demanded dealings in realities which swiftly had made all before seem illusory and phantasmagorical.