Ruth of the U. S. A. — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Voice of the Bulletin

The novel’s opening paragraphs read like a wire-service dispatch: short, declarative sentences, each contradicting the last. “The U-boats were beaten; the U-boats were sweeping the seas.” This rhetorical pattern—assertion followed by reversal—creates a rhythm of instability that persists throughout. The narrator rarely settles on a single truth; instead, it reports the swing of credulity. This is not the voice of an omniscient historian but of a contemporary observer, immersed in the daily churn of war news.

Later, when the action shifts to the road to Montdidier, the prose becomes more sensory and immediate: the grinding motor, the French spoken to passengers, the physical act of leaping down from a truck. The contrast is deliberate. The bulletin voice conveys the macro-level chaos; the intimate voice conveys the micro-level response. Together, they produce a narrative that feels both panoramic and personal, though the two registers do not always blend smoothly.

Pacing Through the Wreckage

Balmer controls tempo by alternating between compressed summary and extended scene. The early chapters race through the first months of American involvement in a few paragraphs; later, a single drive from Mirevaux to a flying field occupies several pages of dialogue and observation. The effect is that the novel’s pace mirrors the protagonist’s own shifting relationship to time: in the relief work, hours blur; in the spy work, minutes matter.

One notable deceleration occurs when Ruth stops her truck to cool the motor. The pause allows for a quiet exchange about Grand’mère Bergues’ tree—a green twig saved from a tree the Germans had declared destroyed. This moment of stillness, set against the larger retreat, functions as a thematic counterweight. The narrative lingers on the twig, on the old woman’s stroke, on the act of carrying her. Then, abruptly, the car restarts and the pace quickens again. The reader is left with the sense that these pauses are not rest but preparation.

The Unspoken Shift in Rôle

The excerpts show Ruth moving from a driver who “got so wrapt up in the work at Mirevaux” to someone who, by the end of the sample, is headed for Montdidier or Amiens with undefined “other tasks.” The narrative does not announce this transformation; it registers it through Gerry’s perception. He notices “a queer, pulling sensation” when he watches her drive, and he contrasts her with Agnes Ertyle, who could cry over wounded boys but could not have told a story “without any emotion at all.”

The change in Ruth’s role is mirrored by a change in the narrator’s focus. Early scenes emphasize her competence with the truck, her ability to calm passengers, her practical problem-solving. Later, the narrator withholds her intentions: “she had formed determinations which would take her as soon as possible to her other tasks.” The reader, like Gerry, is left to infer. This reticence is a deliberate narrative choice—a way of keeping the spy’s work hidden even from the reader, preserving the mystery of what Ruth will become.

Readers attentive to shifts in register will find that Ruth of the U. S. A. rewards close attention to its transitions: from the global to the local, from the declarative to the hesitant, from action to stillness. The novel’s voice is not uniform, and its pace is not steady. That unevenness is not a flaw but a feature—a formal echo of a world where “everything uncertain” was the only certainty. Approach the text as a document of its moment, and let the contradictions stand.

Reading Ruth of the U. S. A., I kept thinking about how some stories become a quiet place to wander, the way the Rockies felt when I first opened In the Rockies with Kit Carson — Context and Discussion. Both carry that sense of being far from safety, yet oddly at home in the open.