DAY AFTER DAY THE BATTLE raged. When there were pauses in the fighting, cries could be heard as the wounded were examined, lifted and carried to the dressing-stations. The staff of the Sanitary Corps showed a remarkable skill, often hidden under a rough manner. There were many too worn out to try to conceal their weariness; and others who wore their weariness openly, not caring how it showed.
For the present there was no attempt to bury the dead. There would be time for that later on . . . and if not . . . Whenever it was mentioned there was a great shrugging of shoulders.
They had a name for the work of the dogs who went about searching for signs of life in the motionless forms; they called it “gleaning.”
Renni was frightened at the dead bodies. At first he started back from them in terror. He did not seem to understand what he saw, yet in his inmost being he knew what death was. He trembled with fear, and crept forward in a sort of anguish. When he found a man seriously wounded, doubts plagued him whether the man still lived and he would turn to his master for help. George had no strength to share with him, for he was himself too shaken by pity and horror and a sort of tremendous astonishment. He had to make a painful effort to collect his wits, to gain at least a halfway control of himself.
Once when they came back in the night from their scouting, they were both so unnerved they could not think of sleep.
The battle had raged all day, and had taken more than its fair share of life. George and his comrades had divided up the field, and each gone his way with his dog without concern for the others.
Their army had won the field, had moved forward and was now far ahead. Artillery rumbled in the distance. Rockets glared. The percussions of aerial bombs, shooting up from the earth, looked like sheet lightning. One had the impression of a terrific storm, whose lash was nerve-shattering.
The surgeons worked away at the several first-aid stations, worked in great haste, in swift silence, full of pity and yet irritated by a sense of helplessness before all the suffering.
Going off a little to one side, George sat down with Renni. Appalling sounds came to them from the first-aid station. They sat in the dark, on the bare earth, and looked off toward the storm of battle, raging away in the distance.
George gave a deep, hopeless sigh. Renni looked around at him.
“Yes, old man, we’re helping,” said George softly. “We two are helping as much as we can. But help, real help, for such things as this, that lies beyond our power.”
Renni wagged his tail, so that the noise of it on the ground sounded like ghostly whispering.
“What we’re doing,” George continued, “is so little, so pitifully little . . . no matter how we try . . . no matter if we give our all. It comes to nothing. The suffering of men is so great, so immeasurably great.”
Then Renni laid his head in George’s lap, as if to comfort him. The gentle tapping of his tail took on a sound like something out of the good earth, like something well known, intimate, like a kind of soothing speech.
George’s hand stroked Renni’s head while his words went on: “And still . . . and still we’re necessary, you and I.” He talked to him as though to a fellow man. He opened his heart to him, poured out the burden of his sorrow, sure of being understood; or perhaps it made little difference whether he was understood or not. George had to say what was in his heart, and so he went on with his soliloquy. He kept stroking Renni’s silky forehead, and talking softly. “Yes, we two are needed . . . and we are useful . . . in spite of everything, my dog . . . . We bring a man now and then out of this inferno . . . help him in his helplessness . . . not many, a few. In war people cease to be persons, separate individuals. So long as men are under fire, can keep on their feet, can go on shooting and charging like robots, they’re not themselves at all; they forget they have a life of their own, they forget their work, their hopes, their sorrows, their joys. They simply have to forget it all. They must. They’re only senseless atoms. Atoms in a strange and terrible compound. But a mighty will runs through them, a sort of mass intoxication, a compelling force to overcome the power of the enemy, to reach an objective, and this force melts them all together into one living whole . . . victory, fame! Yes, yes, my good Renni, you know nothing of the might, the soaring aspiration of this mob spirit.”
He was silent a while. He pressed the warm body of the dog closer to him, felt the tenderness, the perfect love, which flowed into him from it. He responded to it. “We two at least can see the other side. We care for the poor fellows who lie wounded on the ground. We carry them out, and they . . . well, when they wake up, when they’re put to bed, they cease to be atoms, then. They’re men again, persons, individuals . . . with a fate of their own . . . all too often a fate distorted out of all semblance of itself.”
He sighed. “Oh, God! War leaves all its victims wrecked in body, soul or spirit, or all three.” He breathed deeply. “Only a very few, only the most robust come out of this mad horror unscathed. Or do any so? Who knows?”
George stopped talking. His head sank wearily on his breast, but he did not sleep. Renni, his muzzle in George’s lap, slumbered soundly in spite of his uncomfortable position.
The distant thunder was now stilled. The surgeons at the dressing-station had finished their work. The ambulances clattered off to the hospitals with their broken burdens.
Silence brooded over the dark plain. The stars shimmered in the heavens. It was not long till morning. Then, high in the air, sounded the song of birds, a trilling magically lovely, a glad, melodious outburst.
George lifted his eyes astonished. Renni awoke on the instant, shook himself, looked up eagerly at the sky. Both listened to the birds’ song, ringing down from up there in a miracle of music. In the first grey of dawn they could not distinguish the larks soaring among the clouds. George could only make out that the ground before them, trampled, pitted with craters, strewn with the dead, had once been tilled land, a cultivated field.
The tiny larks, in some miraculous fashion left unharmed in all this horror, had risen above it and greeted the rising sun as on any happy morning.
Renni wagged his tail gently, and stared upward. George had to wipe his eyes, for they were wet with tears.