Ruth Fielding at the War Front

Ruth Fielding at the War Front is a nice little piece of propaganda. Stratemeyer’s perfect American boys and girls all had to do their duty by their country when the U.S. entered WWI, of course, so in this book, Ruth is working for the Red Cross, Tom is a lieutenant in the army, and Helen is doing something or other in Paris. I would probably know what, specifically, if I’d read Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross, the book before this one. Anyway, Helen is out of the picture for most of this one.

Ruth is working at a hospital in a French town near the Front, pretty close to where Tom is stationed. One evening she sees some officers from his regiment and asks them how Tom is doing. They all clam up immediately. When Ruth asks her ambulance driver friend Charlie Bragg what he thinks that was about, he says he heard something about an American soldier who was spying for the Germans, and he hadn’t heard a name, but now he thinks it must be Tom Cameron because nothing else would explain the reaction of those officers.

Ruth is brave and smart in this one, but not too much so: she’s clever enough to note certain suspicious things, but she eventually find out that the people she suspects of being German spies are actually good guys. And, of course, she helps rescue Tom Cameron from the difficult situation he’s in, but she’s not really in charge, and Tom and her new friend Major Henri Marchand do just as much as Ruth does.

I guess I haven’t got much to say about this one. But I’m still enjoying Ruth Fielding. Next up is Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest.