At the end of the five days she had been led before a military court of three men--von Fallenbosch and two other officers--who accused, tried, and sentenced her without permitting her any semblance of defense; she was led back and locked up again awaiting the day for the execution of the death penalty, which had been left to the discretion or the whim of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch. Her end might come, therefore, upon any day, or upon any hour, and without warning; it might not come for weeks or months; her execution might not, indeed, occur at all. But a more terrible suspense of sentence scarcely could be devised. Its purpose ostensibly was to make her disclose facts which the Germans believed that she knew. Of course they had held inquisition of her immediately upon capture and several times since, but without satisfactory result; so they kept her locked up. For reading matter she was supplied with German newspapers. These proclaimed with constantly increasing boastfulness the complete triumph of the German arms. Everywhere the Germans had attacked, the allies had crumpled, fleeing in disorder, leaving guns by the hundred, prisoners by the tens of thousands. One more stroke and all would be over! Prince Ruprecht would be on the channel; the Crown Prince would be in Paris! Ruth had seen German newspapers before and she had known of their blatant distortions of truth, but she had never seen anything like the vaunts of those days. These must have, she feared, much foundation in fact. Visions of catastrophe to the British Fifth Army, of the rout from the Hindenburg line almost to Amiens, and the terrors of the retreat haunted her in her solitary days. Was it possible that the English were completely crushed and that the French were helpless? Possible that the American army, which now was admitted to have arrived in some force, had proved so utterly unfit for European warfare that the allies dared not send it into the battle line? The few words spoken to her by the man who attended her boasted that such were the facts. She thought of that front from Soissons to Reims, where the French lay unaware, perhaps, that upon them was soon to come the final, overwhelming attack. It must be in the last stages of preparation, with the hundreds of thousands of reserve troops secretly concentrated by night marches; with the thousands of guns and millions of shells secreted and in place for another such surprise attack to be delivered in some amazing, unforeseen manner as that assault which two months ago swept over the plains of Picardy and broke the English line. Perhaps already the attack was begun; perhaps----