Bel Ria
Dog of War
Sheila Burnford
THE NEW YORK REVIEW CHILDREN’S COLLECTION
New York
The author makes grateful acknowledgment to the following:
The Canada Council of Arts
The Imperial War Museum
The B.B.C. Written Archives
Ministry of Defence (Navy Department)
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1977 by Sheila Burnford.
Copyright renewed © 2005 by Peronelle Philip, Juliet Pin and Jonquil Covello
All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has catalogued another edition of this book as follows:
Burnford, Sheila.
Bel Ria : dog of war / by Sheila Burnford.
p. cm. — (New York Review children’s collection)
Summary: When his owner is killed during the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940, a little performing dog changes the lives of successive caretakers as he journeys through the war-ravaged countryside looking for a permanent home.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-211-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59017-211-6 (alk. paper)
1. Dogs—Juvenile fiction. [1. Dogs—Fiction.
2. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction.
3. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ10.3.B935Bel 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2006020775
ISBN: 978-1-59017-883-6
v1.0
Cover design: Louise Fili Ltd.
Attributed to Charles Green, The Entertainer (detail), c. 1870; © Michael Graham-Stewart / The Bridgeman Art Library
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
1
2
3
Part Two
4
5
6
7
8
Part Three
9
10
11
12
13
14
Biographical Notes
In Memoriam
1939–1945
“Let Hercules himself do what he may.
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.”
—Hamlet VI:313
Part One
Chapter 1
ITS FLAKING RED PAINT almost obscured by dust, an old swayback gray horse between the shafts, the caravan stood out even among the bizarre lines of transport that filled the last free roads of France that bright June morning in 1940. Alone it creaked along against the civilian refugee traffic, the endless frieze of handcarts and ancient perambulators, wheelbarrows and farmcarts, the weary disillusioned people. All were on the open road, but only the caravan belonged by custom to the open road; only those who lived and had their world by it were true vagrants. It was this outlandish rightfulness that turned the caravan into an affront to the fleeing homeless. Only a few short weeks ago such passersby would have stirred interest, curiosity, and even sometimes envy of a here today and gone tomorrow existence, but today there was only a sullen resentment and distrust of strangers who took a road leading back toward the approaching enemy.
Even the little dog that led the caravan was different. There were other dogs on the road that day, but taking their mood from their owners they padded along as dispiritedly as the heels that moved before them, tails low, panting, gray and formless as the dust. This alien dog that alone passed the other way took vivid form: head and tail held high, trotting along with important cheerful intent; sometimes almost prancing, at a carefully kept distance ahead. It appeared to lead the horse, for the reins lay slack in the hands of an ancient man huddled in layers of shawls on the wide seat. A tiny monkey, perched on his shoulder, gazed intently ahead as though making up for his lack of interest.
Walking at the side by the ditch, a tall black-clad granite-faced woman led a shuffling, shabby bear, which occasionally sank back on its hindquarters with muzzled head swinging low, and refused to move. Each time, after a brief glance back, but apparently unsummoned, the dog halted the horse by sitting down before it, then ran back to bark encouragement while the woman alternately tugged on the chain and prodded the brown bulk with her foot. When the bear was once more on the move, the dog returned to rouse the horse and the wheels creaked into action again. A young donkey on a rope halter tied to the back of the caravan completed the procession.
Hard-pressed by the German spearheads thrusting to close the gap between them and the last escape route in France, there was still an intermittent stream of military traffic and troops passing on the opposite side of the road, heading for St. Nazaire on the Brittany coast. The remnants of Operation Panther and the weary stragglers from the general retreat across France after Dunkirk threaded through the painfully slow civilian congestion with frequent hold-ups while broken-down vehicles were manhandled out of the way. On the northbound side, only a rare rearguard squadron of light tanks, armored cars, or the occasional army truck being driven back to the wrecking dump pulled out to pass the caravan, so that almost always it was the civilian traffic opposite that had to give way or take to the ditches, and this sometimes engendered outright hostility.
The woman and the old man appeared either deaf or totally indifferent to the verbal abuse from across the road; at each enforced halt they and their animals seemed to freeze into stony immobility, waiting only for some signal to reactivate them. But whether this was communicated by the woman or by the leader, the dusty little dog, who sat back squarely on his haunches as though propped there by rigid front legs, it was impossible to tell. Certainly there was no movement to the reins from the bundle on the seat, into whose folds of shawls the monkey would disappear during the halts.
Corporal Sinclair of the Royal Army Service Corps, who by one of the more lunatic entanglements of red tape and chaotic communication had orders to drive his empty truck back from the coast to be wrecked at Montoire, had inched along at the heels of the donkey for a long mile, unable to swing out and pass, his vision ahead almost obscured by the high, swaying caravan. He had followed it so slowly and so closely that he felt almost as though he were part of it.
Once, returning to the truck after maneuvering a broken-down hearse off the road, he had tried to make communication, smiling at the woman as he bent to pat the dog, but the head beneath his fingers was directed only to the woman, and her dark face was unresponsive. A distant stare rewarded his sketchy French. He tried again, proffering a pack of cigarettes. After a moment’s hesitation, she took one and tucked it behind her ear, refusing another; but for a fleeting moment Sinclair saw a relaxation in the grimly set lips and, as though taking his line from her, the dog stirred his short tail. Soon after that the road cleared and the caravan and truck started off again.
After half a mile, however, they met a straggling platoon of Pioneers who had missed their rendezvous somewhere. The sergeant stopped the truck and suggested that the soldier do a kindly about-turn and carry his flagging grandfathers back down the road until they found some other available transport. Sinclair had time in hand. His orders were to report first to Movement Control at Savenay when and however was possible. The useful life of this vehicle might as well be extended. The Pioneers piled gratefully in with their picks and shovels and he set off.
It was n
oon before he caught up with the caravan on his return trip, during a long halt while a convoy passed at erratically spaced intervals. It was hot, dusty and noisy, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. The woman had taken out a goatskin water carrier which she handed up to the old man. He threw back his head and directed a stream of water into his mouth, then in turn she drank. The tethered bear sank down on its haunches, the extended forepaws pressed together, begging. She filled a bottle; clasping it like a child, the bear inserted the open end through the steel and leather of the muzzle and tilted the contents down its throat. A canvas bucket was set in turn before the horse and donkey. Finally she filled an enamel bowl, and the dog came running to lap.
A panting black mongrel crossed the road, thrust its head into the bowl and gulped avidly. The little dog moved aside, unaggressive, until the woman intervened and edged off the intruder. A young woman with a child on her hip crossed the road and held up a tin pitcher, asking for water. There was no reply, and she resorted to sign language, pointing at the child, the pitcher, her mouth. Finally she shouted, so loudly and angrily that the child howled. Without any recognition the dark woman continued to hold the bowl while her dog lapped. Only when the other spat contemptuously, directly into the bowl, did she straighten up, and with eyes blazing, she hurled it at the young woman’s skirts. Quick as a flash, although encumbered with child and pitcher, the mother picked up the bowl and aimed at the little dog, who leaped for the shelter of the driving seat. A stone flew across the road from the hand of an ancient but suddenly agile crone, and found a target on the bear’s nose; as it whimpered and shook its head, droplets of bright blood scattered over the dust. Another stone followed to rattle on the caravan, and another.
Sinclair got out, prepared to do he knew not what, but bound by some obscure north versus southbound loyalty, and outraged by the pitiful senselessness of this shabby bear pawing feebly at its bleeding nose.
He was saved from action by the last tank rumbling by to meet the last carrier of the convoy; they met in the middle of the road, and chaos intervened. When the road was cleared, he returned to find the caravan lurched precariously in the ditch, the dog barking by the plunging straining horse while the woman alternately pushed and hung on to the tilting side. Even the old man had been galvanized into enough life to flap the reins. The sullen audience across the road, once more on the move, trudged by indifferently. With the aid of a passing dispatch rider and an inexplicably bicycling Sikh rifleman, the soldier got the caravan back on the road. At the last heave, the back near wheel collapsed, the axle pin sheared. Despite the tilted axle shaft, the caravan miraculously remained upright. The woman suddenly looked drawn and exhausted, close to despair. Sinclair produced a wheel jack.
“All in the day’s work,” he said cheerfully and showed her how to use the jack. “You might as well keep it,” he added later, when the wheel was replaced, and a spare pin fitted. But despite eloquent pointings from the jack, to himself, and then to her, she still looked dubiously at him. At last she rummaged in her skirt pocket to produce a small purse from which she extracted a few coins. The soldier closed her fingers around the money, then shook the hand with a smile of refusal. He pointed to the water carrier and indicated that he would rather have a drink, but she upended the skin, with a somewhat wry smile at its emptiness.
They were standing by the driving seat, their heads on a level with the dog sitting there, his bright, alert eyes under a topknot of pulled-back hair, going from one face to the other, as though interpreting every expression. The doll-sized head of the monkey, now perched on his back, peered ludicrously over the topknot.
The woman’s face suddenly cleared as she looked at them. She clicked her fingers. The monkey immediately transferred to her shoulder, the dog jumped down and rose to his hind legs beside her. With the occasional slight motion of her hands, she put him through a small repertoire of tricks. Importantly, accompanied by the faint sweet tinkling of a bell around his neck, he strutted back and forth, turned three rapid backward somersaults, then finally sat up at their feet with one paw raised in salute. The woman gazed down at him, her face softened by obvious pride. The dog looked back at her with beaming eyes, his slight body quivering as she reached in her pocket and tossed him some small tidbit which he caught in midair.
The soldier applauded. Clearly this display had been his reward. He turned to go. The monkey in her arms pouted its lips, then smacked them in an astonishingly loud kissing noise and held out an upturned pink paw. The soldier laughed and shook it. “Good-bye,” he said, “and good luck — bonne chance, madame.” But already she was hurrying to untie the bear tethered to a steel stake in the shade of the overgrown hedge.
She tugged and prodded and shouted, but the bear lay unmoving, its muzzle half-buried in leaves, the little eyes sunken and apathetic. She broke off a branch as a switch and raised it threateningly. The bear whimpered, closed its eyes and winced in anticipation, and at this she gave up the struggle. She threw away the branch, then, hands on hips, stared down, indecisive. Just as Sinclair was about to drive off she ran towards him, and pointed to his rifle. Somehow she made him understand; there was no food for the bear, it was only an added burden, it had been someone else’s livelihood, this dancing bear, never theirs . . .
Sinclair did not hesitate; to his mind, this sorry beast would be better out of its misery. He slipped a round in his rifle and followed her back. She held the bear’s chain, with no change of expression on her set face, and it was all over in a second. Thriftily she removed the muzzle, collar and stake, and the soldier pulled some branches over. She took his hand and shook it warmly, then pointed from the mound at their feet to the old man at the reins. For an astounded second, the soldier thought that he was being asked to dispose of him too. But it must have been merely a comment on how much easier life would now be, for with a smile of satisfaction, she swung herself up beside the ancient bundle and took the reins herself. The monkey, chattering excitedly, jumped onto her lap. The dog had already taken up his station ahead of the horse. She accorded the soldier a brief nod as he drove past.
The retreating traffic petered out markedly as Sinclair drove on. The caravan had given him a brief refreshing interlude from being one with this humiliation of retreat, this frustrating absurdity of driving these miles solely to destroy his vehicle, then to become himself one with this desperate flight from France. At least the caravan and its quaint entourage had a complete objectivity in the midst of this gray uncertainty — an uncertainty that was exemplified when he reached Savenay, only to be ordered by a chaotic Movement Control to drive the truck back again to Montoire, and there to hand it over to the wrecking crew. After that, he was to make his way back to St. Nazaire for embarkation. “Get there after dusk,” the sergeant advised. “It’s not a healthy place in daylight.”
Sinclair was one of the last drivers to leave the blazing dump at Montoire, and it was there at the very moment of departure, ironically, after weeks of bombing and shellfire during the long haul back across France from the over-run Dunkirk beaches, that he was wounded; a tin exploded from a burning NAAFI truck and tore a jagged path across his ribs, so that every breath he took now was a searing reminder. Someone had covered the wound with a field dressing.
There was only one truck left at the dump for the eventual transportation of the wrecking crew itself, and as he could no longer help he left to take his chances of a lift on the road. By now the situation was totally confused, he was told, and all communication had broken down. France was almost overrun, but here and there, apparently, between the advancing spearheads of the German columns, were clear lanes down which a man might yet make his way to the coast.
He shouldered his rifle and pack and started off down a deserted side road. An atmosphere that was almost calm lay over the land now, of resignation perhaps; those who remained went about their business, hoarding, burying, destroying, preparing for the long siege ahead. For some it was but a repetition of another time, another oc
cupation, the years of familiar endurance to be faced once more. In the end, the day of freedom must surely break; in the meantime children must be comforted to sleep, old people’s querulous needs be met; there were eggs to be gathered and cows to be milked.
The road stretched out before the soldier, a composite of all the pictures he had ever seen of roads left in the wake of a retreating army in other countries, other wars, something he had never expected to see himself; the abandoned wrecked equipment of an army haphazard with civilian pathos, the stiff-legged carcass of a horse, a handcart with a broken axle, an ancient Citroën on its side, one wheel turning in the soft wind, a battered doll face-down in a patch of oil beside it. Half in, half out of a ruined basket, crouched a carrier pigeon with one wing shot away, life still in the glazed uncomprehending eye. After five paces the soldier turned back and broke its neck, watched only by the yellow satanic eyes of two goats grazing down the hedge. In the field beyond, a small herd of thin cows, bellowing with the pain of unmilked udders, pressed against a gate leading to the farmyard, but the only sign of life in the farmhouse was a cat sitting on the window ledge. Clear above the bellowing, a thrush sang jubilantly from an ivy-covered oak; a short song, and when it was finished there was a moment of listening silence when even the cows were silent, and then the distant rumble of guns from the coast intruded. The soldier shifted the weight of pack and rifle and plodded on down the macabre desertion of the road.
He was very, very tired. He could not remember when he had last slept for more than a snatched hour at a Rest Center; he had lost a good deal of blood, and he now felt as dazed and numb with hurt as the pigeon, as uncomprehending as the cows. He tried to take his mind off his body, to think of other things as he walked: of his young wife, now working in a munitions factory; of his father, in the long west highland glen leading from the sea loch. It had been winter when he was last there, the red stags awaiting his coming with feed on the white windswept hills. Now the hills would be tender green, sunlit and shadowed by cumulus, the stags ranging far beyond the glen, the hinds high and secret with their newborn calves. His father would be doing the work of two men, a solitary old man in the white cottage that had been home . . .
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