The news, however, left no loopholes for doubt. The great German assault, which had begun the morning before, already had developed a complete break-through of the British front. The Germans, in one tremendous dash, had overrun the first lines of defense, the second, and the third; they were advancing now in open country with only remnants of an army before them; and the center of this huge wave of the enemy advance was what had been the French village of Roisel. CHAPTER X: THE GREAT ATTACK 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.