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The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism
Sponsored by the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace,
Stanford University, Stanford, California.
The Faces of Contemporary
Russian Nationalism

By John B. Dunlop

Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Guildford, Surrey
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be
found on the last printed page of this book
ISBN 0-691-05390-1
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the
Henry A. Laughlin Fund of Princeton University Press
His book has been composed in Linotron Caledonia
Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books
are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are
chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although
satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually
suitable for library rebinding.
Printed in the United States of America by
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace,

founded at Stanford University in 1919 by the
late President Herbert Hoover, is an interdisciplinary
research center for advanced study on domestic and
international affairs in the twentieth century.
The views expressed in its publications are entirely
those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the staff, officers, or
Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
To Maria, John, Olga, and Catherine
Contents

PREFACE IX
1 The Historical Background (I): 1917-1953 3
2 The Historical Background (II): 1953-1981 29
3 The Voluntary Societies 63
4 Demographic and Social Dislocations 93
5 Cultural Manifestations of Russian Nationalism 109
6 The Nationalities Problem 133
7 The Church 166
8 Mentors from the Past 201
9 Ideological Struggle 217
10 The Contemporary Russian Nationalist Spectrum 242
11 Theoretical Considerations and Policy
Recommendations 274
POSTSCRIPT 291
APPENDICES 295
INDEX 355
Preface

This book was written to acquaint readers with a current of

thought and sentiment that has increasingly made its pres­
ence felt in the USSR since the mid-sixties and that, in one
form or another, could become the ruling ideology of state
once the various stages of the Brezhnev succession have come
to an end. Despite the critical significance of this phenome­
non, Russian nationalism of the post-Stalin period has been
little studied and even less understood in the contemporary
West. With a few exceptions, American academics began to
focus on Russian nationalism only in the mid-seventies, and,
at the time of writing, only two books—Ethnic Russia in the
USSR, a collection of conference papers edited by Edward
Allworth, and The Russian New Right, a slender study by
recent Emigre Aleksandr Ianov—had appeared on the sub­
ject.
In this book, I have pursued the following aims: to com­
municate to a Western readership the thought and core feel­
ings of contemporary Russian nationalists; to convey a sense
of the range of present-day Russian nationalist positions; to
determine, at least roughly, the appeal of Russian nationalists
to various elite and mass constituencies in the Soviet Union;
and to make some tentative suggestions concerning the direc­
tion that Western, and particularly American, policy should
take vis-^-vis the nationalists.
The first two chapters provide the historical background to
the development of Russian nationalism in the Soviet period.
Chapters Three through Eight examine those issues that loom
largest in the eyes of contemporary nationalist spokesmen:
the preservation of historical monuments and of the environ­
ment; demographic and social developments that are seen as
harmful to the well-being of the Russian people; cultural
expression; the relationship between ethnic Russians and the
minority nationalities; the role that should be played by the
Russian Orthodox Church; and the significance of nationalist
tribunes of the past, such as the early Slavophiles and Dos-
X PREFACE

toevskii. In treating these issues, I attempt to determine why

they, in particular, should have attracted the attention of
present-day nationalists.
Chapter Nine concentrates on three sharp disputes that
broke out between the nationalists and their opponents, both
within the regime and in dissident circles, in the late sixties
and the seventies; these disputes give some notion of the
strengths and vulnerabilities of both "official" and dissenting
Russian nationalists. On the basis of the preceding sections of
the book, the final two chapters delineate the spectrum of
nationalist positions as they exist today and suggest theories
about the kind or kinds of nationalism they encompass. Chap­
ter Eleven concludes with some modest policy recommen­
dations.
In seeking to uncover the mind of the contemporary Rus­
sian nationalist, I have used the following sources: materials
appearing in the Soviet press, particularly in publications of
an overtly nationalist orientation; samizdat writings circulated
by Russian nationalist spokesmen; nationalist writings appear­
ing in the Emigre press; interviews with and letters received
from recent &nigr£s, many of them Russian nationalists; and
discussions with Western visitors to the USSR. Antinational-
ist polemics published in the Soviet Union and the antina-
tionalist writings of various representatives of the so-called
"third emigration" have also been consulted. As anyone who
has attempted to research a controversial movement or phe­
nomenon in the contemporary Soviet Union will attest, it is
not possible, due to Soviet censorship restrictions and secu­
rity concerns, to collect exhaustive data on such a topic.
Nevertheless, despite unavoidable problems connected with
the collection of information, I believe that a reasonably ac­
curate picture has been given of the strength and political
viability of contemporary Russian nationalism.
To conclude, this study represents a necessarily difficult
and cross-disciplinary synthesis of a large and disparate body
of material. It is my hope that other scholars will correct any
faulty analyses or misplaced emphases that they find in the
 PREFACE χΐ

book, and that they will fill in the gaps that must inevitably
appear in a project of this scope.
In transliterating, I have consistently followed a variant of
the Library of Congress system.

I WOULD like to thank The Hoover Institution for appointing

me a National Fellow for the 1978-1979 academic year, thereby
affording me an opportunity to write the greater part of this
book in the congenial setting of the Stanford University cam­
pus. Special thanks are due to Dennis L. Bark, Acting Direc­
tor of the National Fellows Program, and his able assistant,
Janet Dutra, for helping to make my stay at Hoover a pro­
ductive one. I should also like to convey my gratitude to the
National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded my
project through a grant to The Hoover Institution.
Warm thanks are due to Constantin Galskoy of Hoover,
who read through the entire manuscript and made a number
of useful suggestions, and to Hilja Kukk of The Hoover Insti­
tution Library, who helped me in ways too numerous to elab­
orate.
Oberlin College assisted my research by granting me a leave
of absence and by awarding me, through the college Research
and Development Committee, several modest grants-in-aid
to facilitate the collection of materials relevant to my project.
The following specialists generously supplied me, either at
my request or at their own initiative, with documents ger­
mane to my topic: the late Andrei AmaTrik, Mikhail Agurskii,
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Peter Christoff, Stephen F. Cohen,
Martin Dewhirst, Milorad Drachkovitch, Bishop Gregory
Grabbe, Alexis Klimoff, Serge Kryzytski, Arcadi Nebolsine,
Michael Nicholson, Dimitry Pospielovsky, Fr. Victor Pota-
pov, Tatiana Rannit, and Peter Reddaway. My thanks to all
of them.
Gail Filion of Princeton University Press and George Ma-
rotta of The Hoover Institution Press were most helpful in
arranging for the publication of this study; the manuscript was
typed in unusually efficient fashion by Pauline B. Tooker.
Finally, it would be churlish not to acknowledge the strong
xii PREFACE

and unwavering support that this project has enjoyed over

the course of many years from my wife, Olga, who prepared
excellent draft translations of the materials contained in the
appendix, and from my children, to whom this book is dedi­
cated.
The Faces of Contemporary Russian NationaHsm
 1

The Historical Background (I)

1917-1953
Die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland.
Das kommunistische Manifest1

. . . the Revolution means the people's final break with the

Asiatic, with the seventeenth century, with Holy Russia,
with ikons and with roaches.
Lev Trotskii2

. . . via Bolshevism, Djugashvili joined the Russian nation.

Robert C. Tucker3

When the Bolshevik party seized power in 1917, it appeared

that the days of Russia as a separate cultural and political
entity might be numbered. In the words of historian Ε. H.
Carr, "Never had the heritage of the past been more sharply,
more sweepingly or more provocatively rejected; never had
the claim to universality been more uncompromisingly as­
serted; never in any previous revolution had the break in
continuity seemed so absolute."4 Fervent believers in world
revolution, captives of a vision in which national distinctions
would be submerged in a rising tide of proletarian interna­
tionalism, Lenin and his colleagues set about with dedication
and flinty ruthlessness to achieve their Utopian aims. Since
Great Russian patriotism had served as one of the legitimizing
props of the old order, the communists were particularly anx­
ious to suppress its manifestations and ensure its eventual
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das kommunistische Manifest, Berlin,

1946, p. 48.
2 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Ann Arbor, I960, p. 94.
3 Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, New York, 1973,

p. 140.
4 E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 1, New York,

1958, pp. 3-4.

4 BACKGROUND, 1917-1953

extinction. In the course of the first years of the Revolution,

the sentence from the Communist Manifesto, "the workers
have no fatherland," was everywhere repeated, while words
such as "patriotism" and "motherland" virtually disappeared
from the Russian vocabulary.
In his 1914 essay "On the National Pride of the Great Rus­
sians," written to counter the patriotic upsurge that had ac­
companied Russia's entry into the First World War, Lenin
made clear in what narrow and restricted a sense Russian
patriotism would be permissible: "We are full of a sense of
national pride, and for that reason we particularly hate our
slavish past . . . and our slavish present. . . . The interests
of the Great Russians' national pride (understood not in the
slavish sense) coincide with the socialist interests of the Great
Russian (and all other) proletarians. Our model will always be
Marx, who, after living in Britain for decades and becoming
half-English, demanded freedom and national independence
for Ireland in the interests of the socialist movement of the
British workers."5 Only those Great Russians who had de­
voted themselves to the struggle against the tsarist state—
Radishchev, the Decembrists, Chernyshevskii, the revolu­
tionaries of the 1870s, the revolutionary working class of 1905—
were singled out by Lenin for praise.
Once established in power, the Bolsheviks proceeded to
attack the pillars of the previous order: the family, the Church,
the school. Divorce on demand was legalized immediately
after the revolution, and abortion on demand followed in 1920.
An explosion of sexual license took place, accompanied by a
greatly increased use (and abuse) of alcohol and tobacco. Bud­
ding theorists speculated that the rearing of children should
become a communal responsibility. A campaign was launched
to eradicate religious survivals from the Russian land. Tradi­
tional school curricula were jettisoned, to be replaced by mil­
itant political indoctrination. Not all of this was to the taste
5 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1964, vol. 21, pp. 104, 106 (Len­

in's italics).
 BACKGROUND, 1917-1953 5

of even the Bolshevik leaders; in a sense, the revolution seemed

to be hurtling on with a momentum of its own.®
A gifted strategist who combined revolutionary fanaticism
with a strong streak of pragmatism, Lenin realized during the
period of War Communism (1918-1921) that the country had
to be slowly and carefully nurtured toward socialism. The
countryside in particular, a bulwark of Russian traditionalism,
had to be handled delicately. With the successful conclusion
of the civil war, therefore, Lenin braked the momentum of
the revolution and ushered in the historic "compromise with
capitalism" known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The
constituent elements of the NEP were: "the substitution of a
tax in kind for the exaction from the peasants of arbitrary
quotas of food, so as to increase their incentive to produce;
the legalization of a wide measure of freedom of internal trade;
and the granting of concessions to private capitalists for the
running of industrial enterprises."7
Lenin viewed these economic concessions, as well as a cer­
tain relaxing of ideological vigilance in cultural matters, as
tactical and temporary, something that some Russian nation­
alists both at home and in the emigration failed to see. Thus
in 1921 there appeared in Prague a collection of essays enti­
tled Smena vekh (Change of Landmarks), written by former
participants of the "white movement." Although the authors
do not agree on all points, a common thread runs through
their contributions: "The revolution is in process of evolution
[Revoliutsiia evoliutsioniruet]."8 The NEP and the Kronstadt
uprising of 1921 were interpreted by the contributors as signs
that Russia was beginning to devour the Bolshevik Revolu­
tion, that the revolution was approaching its Thermidor. The
most gifted of the collection's authors, Ν. V. Ustrialov, felt
that Lenin, whom he termed a "great opportunist,"9 had no
6 Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of

Communism in Russia, New York, 1946, pp. 192-203.

7 Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd ed.,

Cambridge, Mass., 1977, p. 307.

8 Smena vekh, Smolensk, 1922, p. 59. This volume is a reprint of the 1921

Prague edition.
9 Ibid., p. 53.
6 BACKGROUND, 1917-1953

choice other than to be led by the nose toward Thermidor.

Ustrialov placed his hopes on this historical process, rather
than on any "white movements" that would, if they wished
to succeed, inevitably have to ally themselves with foreign
powers not having Russia's interests at heart. As emigre scholar
Gleb Struve has pointed out, Ustrialov seems to have seen
smenovekhovtsvo as a "Trojan horse" whose aim was to trans­
form the revolution from within.10 Ustrialov was a self-pro­
claimed "National Bolshevik"—the term would reappear in
the 1960s—who sharply distinguished Bolshevism from com­
munism.11 Another contributor to the volume, S. Chakhotin,
went so for as to argue provocatively that emigres should go
down on their knees before the Bolsheviks, the servants of
history, as Emperor Henry IV had kneeled in penance before
the Pope at Canossa.
As might be expected, the Change of Landmarks collection
caused a stir both among the 6migr6s, where its arguments
were largely rejected, and in intellectual circles in Soviet
Russia, where its message was received with interest and some
sympathy. In 1922, even Lenin had to admit that the sme-
novekhovtsy expressed "the mood of thousands and tens of
thousands of bourgeois of all sorts" in Russia.12 With the ben­
efit of hindsight, it seems odd that attentive observers of the
Soviet scene should have thought that the revolution had spent
its energies some three to four years after taking power, but
one must remember that the NEP did represent a significant
and deceiving step backward from revolutionary έΐαη and
maximalism. As it turned out, however, it would be almost
half a century before the revolution could be said to have
expended most of its energy.
Lenin's death in 1924 was, of course, followed by Iosif Dju-
gashvili-Stalin's successful bid for power. Stalin's achieve­
ment of autocratic power was eventually to signal an impor­
tant shift in the fortunes of Russian nationalism. One must
remember that Stalin's identification with the Bolsheviks meant
10 GIeb Struve, Russkata literatura υ izgnanii, New York, 1956, p. 32.
11 Ibid.
12 Carr, Socialism in One Country, p. 58.
 BACKGROUND, 1917-1953 7

that he was parting ways with the majority of Georgian rev­

olutionaries, whose sympathies were with the Mensheviks.
Stalin was quite aware that the Bolsheviks represented the
"Russian party" among the Marxists; in 1907, for example, he
pointedly noted that at the London party congress, "whereas
the majority of the eighty-five Menshevik delegates were Jews,
with Georgians in second place numerically and Russians in
third, the great majority of the ninety-two Bolshevik dele­
gates were Russians, with Jews coming next, then Georgians,
and so on."13 Disenchanted with his fellow Georgian revolu­
tionaries, Stalin was delighted to join the predominantly Rus­
sian Bolshevik party and its forceful leader, Lenin, whom he
seems to have idolized. However, since he was not a Russian,
Stalin apparently felt no inner need to share Lenin's belief
that Russia had to "atone" for past sins against the minority
peoples of the Soviet Union. Nor, it turned out, was he as
intense in a belief that Russia had to immolate herself for the
cause of world revolution.
In the jockeying for power that followed Lenin's death, Sta­
lin, as is common knowledge, used the slogan "socialism in
one country" as a cudgel against his chief rival, Trotskii, and
the latter's doctrine of "permanent revolution." "Socialism in
one country" was not Stalin's invention; he borrowed it from
Bukharin, but, unlike Bukharin, he made it a centerpiece of
his thought. The significance of the victory of Stalin's Russia-
oriented socialism over Trotskii's militant internationalism is
very great. In fact, some scholars would date the rise of Rus­
sian nationalism in the Soviet period from the triumph of this
doctrine.14
With Stalin's ascent, there ensued a gradual downgrading
of the internationalist thrust of the revolution. Until 1928, a
member of the Soviet Politburo had headed the Comintern
(the Communist International); after 1928, this ceased to be
13 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, p. 139.
14 This view was expressed by historians Dimitry Pospielovsky and Alek-
sandr Nekrich at a conference on Russian nationalism held at the Kennan
Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in June 1978.
8 BACKGROUND, 1917-1953

the case.15 In spheres other than foreign policy, however,

hostility to things Russian and to vestiges of Russian patriot­
ism continued unabated. In fact, the same year of 1928 that
marked Stalin's consolidation of power also witnessed the
scrapping of the NEP and a new and radical communist "leap
forward"—forced industrialization. As Ε. H. Carr has com­
mented, "the deduction [of a Russian Thermidor] proved un­
sound. The proclamation of socialism in one country was fol­
lowed, not by stabilization on the basis of NEP . . . or by
further retreat into capitalism, but by a feverish drive for the
development of heavy industry—the traditional stronghold of
the class-conscious worker . . . In other words, while social­
ism in one country made its concessions to nationalism, and
thus seemed to diverge from the high road of Marxism, the
proletarian or socialist element in it was also perfectly real."16
And Carr goes on:
The party continued to carry the political programme of
the proletarian revolution. The history of the revolution
consisted of the impact of this dynamic force on a society
dominated by a backward peasant economy. The coming of
NEP had appeared to many to mean that the force of the
revolution was spent, and that the party, as the bearer of
this force, would be quietly reabsorbed into the traditional
society. . . . In reality, the party leadership compromised
far enough with the traditional society to ride out the storm;
this compromise was the essence not only of NEP, but of
socialism in one country. Yet in the sequel it had retained
its revolutionary dynamic unimpaired, and imposed on the
society the consummation of "revolution from above."17
A skilled tactician and pragmatist, Stalin, like Lenin before
him, was willing, when necessary, to brake the momentum
of the revolution and make concessions to the inchoate tra­
ditionalism of the populace. Yet his genuine commitment to
what by this time had become known as Marxism-Leninism
15 Timasheff, The Great Retreat, pp. 156-157.
16 Carr, Socialism in One Country, p. 125.
17 Ibid., pp. 135-136.
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 “Box barrage, sounds like,” Haddon-Staples volunteered when
Ruth stopped to study the direction of the action. “Not much on, I
should say. Trench raid for information, probably.”
“When do you suppose they’ll attack?”
They, of course, were the Germans. “Oh, any time. That’s what
we’re out for a bit of a line on tonight—naturally. Sooner they try it,
the better, don’t you think?”
“You’re—we’re all ready for them?” Ruth asked.
“Ready as may be,” the Englishman returned politely. “They’ve
rather the advantage of us, you know—numerically. A good bit of a
farm here again, isn’t there?” he shifted the subject, gazing over the
level, planted fields.
Ruth talked with him about other things; but her thought remained
with those English guns firing and firing, with the English gunners
serving them, with the English infantry raiding “for information” or
lying in wait for the certain-coming attack of an enemy having a
recognized advantage—numerically. The reason that the enemy
possessed that advantage was, she knew, that America was not yet
in force on the battle line. But for that tardiness, she had not yet
heard one word of censure from Englishmen or from the French.
The guns were still going when she went to bed at half-past ten—
the English guns with the German guns attempting only ordinary
reply. So Ruth slept until a quaking of the ground and a sudden,
tremendous new impact of sound sat her up in the darkness, awake.
She gazed at her watch; it was half-past four. German guns now
were sending the monstrous missiles whose detonation shook the
land; it was the English guns which attempted the reply. Ruth went to
her window and gazed out in the dark toward the lines until the gray
of dawn discovered a thin gray mist over the ground—a mist of the
sort making for surprises of attacking forces upon the forces
defending; and that frightful fire of the German guns meant that, this
morning at last, the Germans were attacking.
Ruth dressed as Mrs. Mayhew and everyone else in the house
was dressing. The thunder of the guns, the never-ceasing
concussion of the bursting shells rolled louder and nearer.
 “That must be the start of their offensive,” Mrs. Mayhew said. “Let
them try; they’ll never get through!”
“No,” Ruth said; and she believed it. She thought of the German
attacks upon Ypres in the early years of the war; of their failure at
Verdun last year and the slow progress of the allies when they had
been on the offensive—the French in Champagne and the English
on the Somme. The others also believed it.
“What will you be about today, dear?” Mrs. Mayhew asked Ruth.
“Oh!”—Ruth needed the moment of the exclamation to recollect.
“I’m going to Aubigny to see that our last lot of portable houses got
there all right and that the people know how to put them up.”
“Then come with me; I’m going to Ham,” Mrs. Mayhew offered,
and during the morning, quite as usual, they drove off together in
Mrs. Mayhew’s car about their business of helping rehouse and
shelter and refurnish the peasants of Picardy.
While they rode in the bright morning sunshine—for the mist was
cleared now—guns, English guns emplaced far behind the lines and
whose presence they had never suspected before, thundered out;
their concussion added to the trembling of the ground; and through
the air swept sounds—swift, shrill, and ominous—not heard on the
days before.
“Shells?” Mrs. Mayhew asked.
Ruth nodded. She had heard the shriek of the shells which had
missed the Ribot and passed over. “Shells, I think,” she said. They
were passing peasants on the road now—families of peasants or
such relics of families as the war had left; some, who had a horse,
drove a wagon heaped high with the new household goods which
they had gained since the invasion; some pushed barrows; others
bore bundles only.
Ruth, who was driving, halted the car again and again.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“We do not know,” the peasants answered.
Ruth drove on into the little city of Ham, where ambulances
bearing the English wounded were arriving in an endless line from
the front. Mrs. Mayhew had seen wounded men—many, many of
them—in the Paris hospitals; Ruth too had seen wounded—almost
two score of people variously hurt aboard the Ribot. But here they
came, not as blessés arrived in Paris, but from the battle field and,
not by scores, but by hundreds, by thousands!
Ruth went sick when she saw them. She thought of Hubert, her
gentle-minded, sensitive Hubert, now helping to handle men so hurt.
She thought of Agnes Ertyle when she saw English women, as well
as English men, receiving the forms from the ambulances at the
great casualty clearing stations where new rows of tents hastily were
going up. She thought, of course, of Gerry Hull. She believed that he
was far removed from this zone of battle; but she did not yet know—
no one yet knew—how far the fighting front was extending. He might
be flying at this moment over a front most heavily involved; she knew
that he would wish to be; and how he would fight—fight as never
before and without regard of himself to check disaster due, as he
would believe, to the tardiness of his country.
She saw a boy in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps lying upon
a stretcher in the sunshine; he was smoking, but he took his
cigarette from his lips to smile at her as she gazed down at him.
British troops—strong, young, uninjured men—marching in
battalions; English guns and ammunition lorries; more English
infantry and guns poured into the streets of the city, passed through
them and on to the front and more came. The wounded from the
front and the French folk from the farms and villages passed on their
way to the rear; but no one else came back.
“The line is steadying itself; it’s holding,” the rumor ran in Ham
during the afternoon. “The Boche gained at first—everyone on the
offensive gains at first—but now we’re holding them; we’re
slaughtering them as they come on.” Then more alarming reports
spread. “They’ve overrun the first lines at points; but the others are
holding or are sure to—the Boche are doing better than at Verdun.”
Then that was denied. “They’re not doing so well. We’re holding
them now. They’re coming on. They’re driving us back.”
Not even the wounded and the refugees, still streaming from the
front, brought reliable report; the battle was too immense for that.
And into the battle, English reinforcements steadily went forward. So
Ruth was sure only that the great battle, which the world had been
awaiting, was begun; she could know nothing of the true fortune of
that first tremendous day. She was finding, however, that Mrs.
Mayhew and she could not go about their work of restoration. They
turned their car upon the road and, inviting refugees, they carried the
peasants swift miles along the roads which they had been trudging;
let them off ten miles or so to the rear and returned for more.
But they urged no one to flee; they simply assisted those already
in flight and who would not be turned back. And that evening, which
was more quiet than the evening before—or at least it seemed so in
comparison to the day—they returned to Mirevaux. The worst was
past, they believed; the line, the English and the French line which
for more than three years had stood and held against the Germans,
had reformed and reestablished itself after the first shake of the
tremendous onslaught.
And so it still seemed to those in Mirevaux that next morning of
Friday when, after breakfast, Ruth discussed again with Mrs.
Mayhew what she would do that day. They were agreeing that they
should be calm and show confidence and go about their work as
usual, when they heard the hoofs of a galloping horse upon the road.
The rider pulled up short before their cottage and Ruth, running to
the door, saw “1583”—the English officer who had waited for her
upon the road from Grand’mère Bergues’ the night before last.
“They’ve broken through!” he called to Ruth.
“Through!” Ruth cried. “The Germans!”
“We can’t hold them! They’re coming on! Fifty thousand of them!
They’ve broken through—through! We couldn’t hold them!”
Ruth recoiled upon the door. Mrs. Mayhew was beside her, calling
out to the officer; but he, having given the alarm to that house, was
going on. Ruth gazed vacantly over the smooth, replowed, replanted
French fields and the rows of grafted orchard trees toward
Grand’mère Bergues’; and her mind gave her, in a flash, vision of the
broken dam of the English line with the German flood bursting
through; and before that flood she saw again the refugees of
yesterday in flight; she saw Grand’mère Bergues with petite Marie
and Victor caught again, perhaps; she saw the wounded on the
roads and in the tents of the clearing stations, cut off by the
Germans and taken; she saw the English troops—the strong, young
men whom she had witnessed marching to the front yesterday—
battling bravely, desperately, but shot down, bayoneted and overrun.
“They’ve broken through. We couldn’t hold them! They’re coming
on!”
Ruth gazed from the ground to the sky and she saw—not in her
fancy but visually above her now—airplanes, allied airplanes flying in
squadrons from the rear toward that front which she could not see
but where, she knew, the line on the ground was broken and gone
and where the Germans, who were “coming on,” must be pouring
through. And her mind showed her in the pilot’s seat of one of those
airplanes—or in one just like them somewhere on that broken front—
Gerry Hull. Vividly she fancied his face as he flew to fight and to
make up, as well as one man might, for the millions of his people
who should have been yesterday and today upon that broken battle
line where the enemy, at last, had broken through!
Ruth could not know then all that a break “through” meant; no one
could know; for in all the fighting in France, no army had broken
“through” before. She could know only that upon her, as an American
quite as much as Gerry Hull, was the charge to do her uttermost.
But what was she to do?
Gerry, arriving that morning at the airdrome to which he had been
ordered, possessed the advantage over her of no uncertainty but of
definite assignment to duty.
During his training and his service with the French, he had piloted
many sorts of machines. He had flown the reconnaissance and
photographic biplanes with duty merely to bring back information of
the enemy’s movements; he had flown the bombing machines
entrusted with destruction, by aerial torpedo, of batteries, and
ammunition dumps behind the enemy’s front; he had flown the
“artillery machines”—the biplanes with wireless by which he, or his
observer, signaled to the French batteries the fall of their shots and
guided the guns to the true targets; he had flown, as all the world
knew, the swift-darting avions de chasse—the airplanes of pursuit—
the Nieuports and the Spads in which, as combat pilot, he had
dueled ten thousand feet up in the sky with the German combat
pilots and shot some twenty of them down. And it was while he was
still in the French service that the flying men began to form new
squadrons for strange service distinct from mere bomb-dropping,
from guiding guns or sending back information or from fighting other
airplanes. Pilots of these squadrons started to attack, by bomb and
machine guns, the enemy infantry and artillery and horse. They had
special, new “ships” made for them—one-seater or two-seater
biplanes mounting two or three machine guns and built to stand the
strain of diving down from a height and “flattening out” suddenly only
a few yards from the ground while the pilot with his machine guns
raked the ranks of troops over which he flew.
It was in one of these new raiding airplanes, accordingly, and as
leader of a flight that Gerry Hull was going to battle this day. The
field, from which he had arisen, had been far back of the English
lines—so far back, indeed, that it still was secure as Gerry guided his
flight of six machines up into the clear spring sunshine. His was one
of the single-seaters; he was alone, therefore, as he led on to the
north and east; and he was glad this morning to be alone. The
exaltation which almost always pervaded him as he rose into the sky
with his motor running powerfully and true, possessed him at its
most this morning; it brought to him, together with the never-dulling
wonder of his endowment of wings and his multiplied strength
therefrom, a despite of fate which made him reckless yet calm.
His altimeter told that he had climbed to some four thousand feet
and content with that height and flying level, he glanced about and
saw that the machines which followed him were flattening out too
and in position. He gazed at his mapboard where was displayed
chart of the land below with notation of the battle line—such battle
line as still existed—corrected up to the last hour by photographs
and visual observations made by other pilots that morning. It was the
strip of ravaged and restored land over which he was flying; clearly
he could see the cross-streaked spots of the cities; on his right,
Ham; on his left, Péronne and Roisel. Roads spider-webbed about
them; tiny villages clustered. Immediately below he could see even,
decent patches of planted fields, gardens, meadows; he could make
out, too, more minute objects—the peasants’ cottages and their
trees, the tiny roofs of the new portable houses supplied by the
Americans.
 He could see the specks which were people upon the roads,
gathered in groups moving together; where the specks formed into a
long, ordered line, he knew that they were troops and moving toward
the battle, probably. He himself was flying so fast that the direction of
the slow movement upon the roads could not appear; but he could
guess that the irregular series of specks were refugees in flight.
Shells were smashing beside them—shrapnel, high explosive, and
gas. He could recognize easily the puff of the shrapnel distinct from
the burst of the high explosive shells. He could not distinguish the
gas shells; but he knew that the Germans were using them, deluging
with gas the zone behind the battle to a depth unknown before.
He gazed forward to the ground where the German infantry now
was advancing—ground sloping so slightly hereabouts that, but for
the shadows, it would have seemed flat. But the morning sun of
March was still circling low, making all bright a strip where shells, in
enormous number, erupted; just short of this strip, the sunlight
ceased sharply in a shadow which did not move; the bright strip
therefore was the eastern slope of a hill and the shadow was its
western descent—a slope where, at this moment, the English must
be attempting a stand.
Gerry gazed to the right to try to find and, with his eyes, follow the
line which ran from this hill; but he could discover none; he glanced
to the left and failed there also to discern support for the English
soldiers on the hill. Surely there must have been support of some
sort thereabouts; but the Germans had overwhelmed or swept it
back. Germans—German infantry in mass, Germans deployed,
German guns engaged and German guns moving forward followed
by their trains—Germans possessed the ground before that sunlit
slope and on its right and left.
He looked farther away to the south and to the north; and he could
witness the truth which already he had been told. The “line,” in the
sense in which one had known the line for three years, was swept
away—first, second, third, and all supporting systems of defense;
attempts to form new lines behind the old had failed. Open field
battle, swift and Napoleonic, was established; for this battle the
Germans had gathered men by the hundred thousands, guns by the
thousand while the English here had—well, the remnants of brigades
and divisions which here and there held to the slope of a hill.
Gerry wondered, as he gazed down, whether these men on the
nearest slope knew that—already half surrounded—there was no
support behind them. He was steering lower as he neared them,
drawing to himself a shell or two from some German anti-aircraft gun
which he did not trouble to try to place. Airplanes appeared all about
him now, above, before, behind, and on both sides; but they were,
most of them, English or French; here and there he glimpsed a
German machine; but none of these approached him to attack. For if
the ground that morning was the Germans’, the air was the allies’; it
was only from the air, from him and his flight of five machines trailing
behind him and from other similar flights of fighting airplanes likewise
arriving, that any help could reach those English about to be
attacked.
For the storm of German shells, which a few seconds before had
been sweeping the slope, lifted suddenly; before the hill and from the
flank, specks which were German storm troops moved forward; and
Gerry, turning his head, saw that the other machines followed him in
position. In signal to them, he rocked his ship a little. Steadying
again, he leaned forward and saw that his machine guns were ready;
softly he touched the release levers of his bombs. His hands went
back to his controls and, gazing below at the German ranks again,
he put the nose of his machine down and dived.
Ordinarily, during the tremendous seconds of the drop, he could
see nothing but the spot of earth at which his eyes were focused,
leaping up and up at him; ordinarily, sensation stopped with the
feeling of fall and the rush of that seeming suck of destruction. But
now his senses took in many things. His eyes never lost the swelling
specks of gray which were becoming German storm troops leaping
to the attack; but his eyes took in, too, the file of forms in English
brown lying waiting over the crest of the hill.
They were scattered and few—very, very few, he saw; fewer even
than he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two
thousand feet higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among
the holders of the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that
the many, many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped
down above them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing
together in little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine,
drawing together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last
desperate defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it.
The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill
from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the
morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their
way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such
jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain
sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on
the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant.
 CHAPTER XI
THE RESISTANCE
But the English were going to fight.
This knowledge came to Gerry through the rush and suck of the
final yards of his three thousand foot fall; mechanically, automatically
his hands were tugging at his controls, his feet braced firm on his
rudder bar as he began to bring his machine out of the fall. He had
come down at terrific speed with his motor only partly shut off; he
had no time, and no need, to watch his speed indicator; he knew well
enough when he was on edge of the breaking strain which his wings
and wires could stand. He slanted more directly toward the Germans
and he was very low above the ground; still half falling, half flying—
and at greater speed than ever he could have flown—he hurled
himself at them, flattening out at perhaps fifty feet from the earth.
He knew—not from anything which he consciously saw nor from
any conscious reckoning but by the automatism of realization and
the reflex from it which guided and coordinated his mind, nerve, and
muscle in these terrific instants of attack—he knew that German
machine gunners were firing at him; he knew that German riflemen
in the ranks which he was charging were giving him bursts of bullets
as fast as they could fire; and his fingers which so tenderly had
touched the release levers of his bombs, pulled them positively now;
with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had gathered
the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted it so
that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that tug and
the reassuring, familiar jet-jet of his guns firing through his airscrew
combined with the burst of his bombs below and behind.
His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it
wider; the detonations which had followed him ceased; his hand flew
back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand
on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly
those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his
airscrew.
He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but
some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the
bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced the
white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans
gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their
bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of
the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to
dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them
down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had
taken position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to
sweep the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though
the swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he
knew that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and
though he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs,
dropped from so close, must be killing many, many more.
The Germans attested to that; they scattered and scurried before
him; he had no row of gray forms for his target now; to save his
cartridges, he had to stop that steady pull on his lanyard; he pursued
groups, firing short bursts of bullets till they broke and scattered
again. He was not fighting alone, of course; the machines in his flight
all had followed him down. He outflew the men on the ground and,
rising while he turned, he got view of the field over which he had
swept; two of his machines which had followed him, were rising
already; the others were still flying low, attacking with machine guns
and bombs; and below them, that line of the German attack was
halted and broken. He could see spaces where his bombs had
exploded or where the machine-gun fire from the airplanes had been
most effective and gray-clad forms strewed the ground; between
these spots, German officers were reforming ranks and getting men
together again. Gerry opened his throttle wide and, circling, climbed
a little more; and then, he dove again and gave it to these gathering
men.
Gave them machine-gun fire alone, now; for his bombs were
gone. He could see the work of the bombs better, and sight of that
work brought him grim exultation. He was glad that this morning he
was no mere duelist of the sky, darting and feinting and dashing in,
spinning about and diving high in the heavens to shoot down just
one enemy; here he had led an attack which had killed or disabled
hundreds. This was no day to glory in single combat.
He had overflown again the men on the ground and, climbing
once more, he got view of the crest of the slope. It was gray! Gray-
clad men were swarming all over it; gray—Germans! Brown men
battled them; bayonets glinted in the sun; the brown men dropped;
gray men toppled, too; but there were more of the gray all about.
How they had got up there, Gerry could not tell; they might be some
of those in the waves at which he had fired and who had gone on;
they might be a different battalion which had charged in from the
flank. They were there; they had taken the hill; they were slaying the
last of the English. Gerry saw the swirls of the brown and gray where
a few survivors, surrounded, were fighting hand to hand to the last.
He forced down the nose of his machine and dropped at them; he let
go one burst of bullets into the gray; let go another and now, as he
pulled on his lanyard, the airscrew before him whirled clear; the jets
did not project through it; his machine guns were silent; their
ammunition was spent.
He had a mad impulse, when he realized this, to swerve lower
and make himself and his machine a mighty projectile to scythe
those German heads with the edges of his wings; he could kill—he
was calculating, in one of those flashes which consume no
reckonable time, the number of gray men he could hope to kill. Ten
or a dozen, at most; and he had just slain—and therefore again that
day might slay—a hundred. But that instinct did not decide him.
Among the gray men, in the only groups upon which he could thus
drop, were brown men, so with his free hand he pulled out his
automatic pistol and, as he flew barely above the helmets of the men
in the mêlée, he emptied the magazine.
English soldiers glanced up at him; ten feet below him were
English boys, doomed, surrounded but fighting. It struck shame
through Gerry the next moment when he was rising clear and safe
that a few seconds before he could have been almost within hand
reach of those English boys fighting to the end on the ground; that,
indeed, he had for a moment fought with them and then he had
deserted them to their death while he had flown free. He looked
back, half banking his machine about; but already the battle upon
that hill crest was over; the last of the English were killed. Gerry
could return only to avenge them; and the way to avenge was with
refilled bomb racks and machine-gun magazines.
That dive to the top of the hill had separated him from the other
machines in his flight except one which was following him on his
return to the airdrome for ammunition and bombs. Gerry, gazing
down, found disorganization more visible than when he had flown to
the front. He could see the English troops, whom he had viewed
advancing upon the roads, spreading out and forming a line of
resistance; but he could better realize how few these English were
for the needs of this mighty emergency. They were taking positions,
not with any possible hope of holding them against the German
masses but only with determination to fight to delay the enemy a little
as Gerry had just seen some of them fight.
He sighted his field and he swooped down upon it, leaping out as
soon as he stopped. He saw that, as he had suspected, rifle or
machine-gun bullets had gone through his wings; but they had not
pierced spars or struts; his wires were tight. While men refilled his
bomb racks and magazines and gave him fuel, he reported what he
had seen and received new orders.
His superiors recognized that the disaster, instead of lessening,
was growing greater each hour. Powerful French and English
reserves were on the way but they were still distant; meanwhile the
local reserves were being used up. The English were gathering
together and throwing in anyone and everyone to try to delay the
German advance; there were kilometers where only this scratch
army offered resistance—sutlers, supply men, and cooks armed with
rifles and machine guns fighting beside Chinese coolies impressed
into a fighting line.
Gerry passed a word with an English pilot whom he knew well and
who was just back from over another part of the battle field.
“Hello, Hull! Your people rather getting into it over my way!”
“Who? How?” Gerry called.
 “One of your engineer regiments were working behind the lines;
line came back on ’em. They grabbed guns and went in and gave it
to the Huns! Should have seen ’em. Can yet; they’re keeping at it.”
The blood tingled hotter in Gerry’s veins; his people were fighting!
His countrymen, other than the few who from the first had been
fighting in the foreign legion or scattered in Canadian regiments or
here and there in the flying forces, were having part in this battle! No
great part, at that; and only an accidental part. Simply a regiment of
American engineers, who had been on construction work for the
British Fifth Army, had thrown down their shovels and tools, grabbed
guns, and gone in.
“You’ve some good girls—some awfully good girls out that way,
too!” the English pilot cried.
Gerry was in his seat and starting his motor so he just heard that;
he rose from the field and for several moments all his conscious
attention was given to catching proper formation with the machines
returning along with him to the battle; but subconsciously his mind
was going to those girls, the American girls—those “awfully good”
girls out that way. He did not know what they might be doing this day
—what it was which won from the English pilot the praise in his
voice. Gerry had known that American girls had been out “that way,”
he had known about the Smith College girls, particularly—the score
or so who called themselves the Smith College Relief Unit and who,
he understood, had been supplying the poor peasants and looking
after old people and children and doing all sorts of practical and
useful things in little villages about Nesle and Ham. He did not know
any of those girls; but he did know Cynthia Gail; and now, as he
found himself in flight formation and flying evenly, thought of her
emerged more vividly than it had previously upon that morning.
When the news had reached him far away on the evening before
that the Germans had broken through in that neighborhood where
she was, he had visualized her in his fears as a helpless victim
before the enemy’s advance. The instincts she had stirred in him
were to hurry him to her protection; that morning as he had looked
down upon the refugees on the roads, mentally he had put her
among the multitude fleeing and to be defended. But the shout of the
English pilot had made Gerry think of her as one of those protecting
—not precisely a combatant, perhaps, but certainly no mere non-
combatant.
Of course the English pilot had not mentioned Cynthia Gail; but
Gerry knew that if American girls were proving themselves that
morning, Cynthia Gail was one of them. He had been able, in vivid
moments, to see Agnes Ertyle; for he knew exactly what she would
be doing; but his imagination had failed to bring before him Cynthia
Gail. In the subconscious considerations which through the violence
of his physical actions dwelt on such ideas, this failure had seemed
proof that Agnes Ertyle alone stirred the deepest within him; but now
those visions of the unseen which came quite unbidden and which
he could not control showed him again and again the smooth-
skinned, well-formed face with the blue, brave eyes under thoughtful
brows, and the slender, rounded figure of the girl whom he knew as
Cynthia Gail. And whereas previously he had merely included her
among the many in peril, now dismay for her particularly throbbed
through him.
Her words when they last were together—“A score or so of you
felt you had to do the fighting for a hundred million of us; but you
haven’t now, for we’re coming; a good many of us are here”—no
longer seemed a mere appeal to him to spare himself; it told him that
she was among those on the ground endeavoring to govern the fate
of this day.
He sighted, before and below, a road where German guns were
being rushed forward; dove down upon them, leading his flight again
and bombed the guns, machine-gunned the artillerymen; he bombed
a supply train of motor lorries; he flew over and machine-gunned two
motor cars with German officers and saw one of the cars overturn.
But German combat pilots were appearing in force all about; Gerry
gazed up and saw a big, black-crossed two-seater accompanied by
two single-seaters maneuvering to dive down upon him.
He swerved off, therefore, and fled. For a moment he longed for
his swift-darting little Spad instead of this heavier ship which bore
bombs in addition to machine guns. But the Spads of his comrades
and English combat machines appeared; and the German pilots
above did not dare to dive. They circled, awaiting reinforcement
which swiftly came—triplane Fokkers mostly, Gerry thought. As he
watched them, he forgot all about the ground; for the French and the
English pilots, ten thousand feet above him, were starting an attack.
He circled and climbed a few thousand feet; he knew that with his
heavy raiding machine, he could not join that battle. But heavy
German airplanes—for observation, for photographic work, or to
guide the advancing German guns—were appearing in the lower
levels and slipping forward under the protection of the Fokkers and
the Albatrosses. Gerry went for one of these and turned it back; he
went for another—a two-seater—and he saw the German machine
gunner fall forward; he saw the pilot’s hooded head drop; he saw
flame flash from the gasoline tank; the two-seater tumbled and went
down.
He dared not follow it with his eyes even for the short seconds of
its fall; machines from the battle above were coming down where he
was. A Fokker dropped, turning over and over to escape a Spad
which came down on its tail and got it anyway; now a Spad streaked
past in flame. A two-seater—a German machine marked by the big
black crosses under its wings—glided slowly down in a volplane.
Gerry circled up to it, approaching from the side with the lanyard of
his machine guns ready; but the German pilot raised an arm to
signal helplessness. His gunner was dead across his guns; his
engine was gone; he had kept control enough only to glide; and he
was gliding, Gerry saw, with the sun on his right. That meant he was
making for German-held ground. He came beside the gliding two-
seater, therefore, and signaled to the west. The German obeyed
and, while Gerry followed, he glided to the field in the west and
landed.
Gerry came down beside him and took the pilot prisoner; together
they lifted the body of the German observer from his seat and laid
him on the ground. Gerry possessed himself of the German’s maps
and papers.
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?
“No,” Gerry said. “Are there many more American girls here?” he
asked, gazing toward the German advance.
“We’re each—or two of us together are taking a village to get the
people out,” the girl said; and she named, at Gerry’s request, some
of the girls and some of the villages.
“Do you know Cynthia Gail?” he asked.
“She was going back, the last I heard of her, to Mirevaux.”
Gerry jerked. “Mirevaux must be taken now.”
“I heard guns that way. That’s all I know,” the girl said. She raced
her engine; Gerry knew she must go on. He left his prisoner in
charge of a wounded English soldier who was able to walk and he
returned to the machines in the middle of the field. The captured
German airplane was too damaged to remove; so he set it afire and
mounted in his own.
The battle in the sky had moved off somewhere else long ago;
neither in the air nor upon the ground was there engagement near
him. He was without bombs but he still had machine-gun
ammunition; he directed his course as he rose into the air toward the
hamlet of Mirevaux.
He could see it clearly from a few hundred feet in the sky—see
shells, which must be from German guns, smashing on a hillside on
the south and shells, which must be from an English battery,
breaking about Mirevaux. These told that the Germans indeed were
in the village and some force of English were maintaining
themselves on the hill. He observed a road west of Mirevaux upon
which appeared such a procession as that to which he had entrusted
his prisoner. The English position, which the Germans were shelling,
flanked this road and partially protected it; but Gerry could observe
strong detachments, which must be German patrols, working about
the English to the northwest and toward the road.
 The English could not see them; nor could the refugees on the
road catch sight of them. Gerry sighted a small, black motor car
moving with the processions. Another American girl was driving that,
probably; or at least an American girl was somewhere down there—
a girl with even, blue eyes which looked honestly and thoughtfully
into one’s, a girl with glorious hair which one liked to watch in the
sunlight and which tempted one to touch it, a girl with soft, round little
shoulders which he had grasped, a girl who had gone into the sea
for him, and whom he had carried, warm in his arms.
A couple of German 77s began puffing shrapnel up about Gerry;
for he was flying low and toward them. But he went lower and nearer
and directly at that patrol. Gerry could see that they were working
nearer the road, with plenty of time to intercept that procession from
Mirevaux; and, though he gave those German guns a perfect target
for a few seconds, he dove down upon the patrol. They were
Jaegers, he thought, as he began to machine-gun them—the sort
whom the Germans liked to put in their advance parties and who had
made their first record in Belgium. Gerry thought of those Jaegers,
with the blood fury of battle hot on them, intercepting that blue-eyed
girl; and when he had overflown them, he swung back and gave it to
them again.
One of the machine guns which had been firing at him from the
ground or some of the shrapnel from the German 77s had got him,
now; for his ship was drooping on the left; the wings had lost their lift.
When he had overflown the patrol the second time and tried to turn
back, he could not get around; his controls failed. The best he could
do was to half pull up into the wind and, picking a fairly flat place
below, to come down crashing that drooping left wing, crashing the
undercarriage, crashing struts and spars and tangling himself in
wires and bracing cables but missing, somehow, being hurled upon
the engine. He was alive and not very much hurt, though enmeshed
helplessly in the maze of the wreck; and the German gunners of the
77s either guessed he might be alive or it was their habit to make
sure of every allied airplane which crashed within range, for a shell
smashed thirty yards up the slope beyond him.
Gerry, unable to extricate himself, crouched below the engine and
the sheathing of the fuselage; a second shell smashed closer; a third
followed. Gerry felt blood flowing inside his clothes and he knew that
he had been hit. But now the German gunner was satisfied or had
other targets for his shells; at any rate, the shells ceased. Gerry was
about a mile away from the gun, he figured; he had flown perhaps
half a mile beyond the Jaeger patrols when he came down. The
road, upon which he had seen the travel, ran just on the other side of
a slope upon which he lay; he could see a stretch of it before it
passed behind the rise of ground and he noticed a black motor car—
possibly the same which he had seen from overhead a few minutes
before—drive toward him. He saw the car halt and a khaki-clad
figure get down from the driver’s seat; it was a skirted figure and
small beside the car; it was a girl!
The German gunner, who had been giving Gerry attention, also
saw the car; and, evidently, he had the range of that visible stretch of
the road. A shell smashed close; and Gerry saw the girl leap back to
her seat and run the car on while a second shell followed it. The rise
hid the car from Gerry and, also, from the German gunners, for again
the shelling shifted.
The next shell smashed on the other side of the slope where the
road again came into sight; the car had not yet reached that part of
the road, so Gerry knew that the German artillerymen were merely
“registering” the road to be ready when the car should run into the
open. But the car did not appear; instead, the girl crept about the
side of the slope and advanced toward Gerry. She had lost her hat
and the sun glowed and glinted upon glorious yellow hair. The
pointer of the 77 did not see her or he disregarded her while he
waited for the car to appear on the registered stretch of the road; but
a machine gunner with the Jaegers got sight and opened upon the
slope. Gerry could see the spurt of the bullets in the dry dust of the
planted field; the girl instantly recognized she was fired at and she
sprang sidewise and came forward.
“Go back!” Gerry called. “Keep away!”
She stumbled and rolled and Gerry gasped, sure that she was hit;
but she regained her feet instantly and, crouching, ran in behind him.
Her hands—those slender, soft but strong little hands which he had
first touched in Mrs. Corliss’ conservatory weeks ago—grasped him
and held him.