The German pilot, who was about Gerry’s own age, had been a little dazed from the fight in the sky; but Gerry discovered that his willingness to surrender and the fact that he had made no attempt to destroy his own machine upon landing was from belief that they had come down upon ground already gained by the Germans. Whether or not that was true, at least it appeared to be ground already abandoned by the English. Certainly no considerable English force existed between that position and the Germans whom Gerry had seen advancing two miles away. No batteries were in action nearby; the airplanes seemed to be standing in an oasis of battle. There was a road a couple of hundred yards to the south, and, seeing travel upon it, Gerry took his prisoner in that direction. He found refugees upon the road--patient, pitiful families of French peasants in flight, aiding one another and bearing poor bundles of their most precious possessions. The sight brought Gerry back to his first days of the war and to the feelings of the boy he had been in August, 1914, when he rushed across the channel from England to offer himself to the Red Cross in France and when he met the first refugees fleeing before von Klück’s army out of Belgium and Normandy. He had seen nothing like this in France since then; and the years of war had not calloused him to these consequences. Indeed, they had brought to him more terrible realizations than the horror-struck boy of 1914 had been able to imagine. So these again were to be visited upon France! And because his people had watched for almost three years, had kept safely out! His prisoner now turned to Gerry and spoke to him in French. “It appears,” he corrected the error he had made when Gerry had taken him, “that you are not my prisoner yet.” “No,” Gerry said. “Not yet.” A Ford truck passed the farm wains and the miserable column of marchers. The driver, Gerry saw, was in khaki and was a girl. She observed him and drew up. “Hello,” she hailed alertly, taking in the situation at a glance. “Do you want to get rid of your prisoner?” She was American--one of those “awfully good” girls of whom the English had told him! And, seeing her and hearing her voice, he knew what the English pilot had meant; and a bit of pride--tingling, burning pride for his people--flared up where the moment before had been only condemnation and despair. For this girl was no mere driver; she was in charge of the French--a cool, clear-headed competent commander of these foreign peasants from a village evacuated under her direction. She had, lying in the hay upon the floor of the truck, children injured by shell fire and English wounded whom she had found by the road. She had been under fire; and, as soon as she could get these people a little farther to the rear, she was going back under fire to guide away more people. She was entirely unheroic about it; why, that was the best thing she could do this day. Did he know something better for her to do?