I SHOULDN’T HAVE IMAGINED she could swim that far.”
“They can dog-paddle forever if they really want to. She simply struck out for shore as we did, and found herself lost and alone again. Pretty lucky.”
“Lucky for us, I’d say. Otherwise we’d have been off for a German Stalag. You never know your luck.”
Sitting on the ground, the Sergeant held the dog in his arms, examining her legs and paws. Occasionally her tail wagged and slapped the ground, occasionally, too, she winced and whined gently as he looked her over. There were cuts in her pads, several bleeding badly.
“Yes, right, pretty lucky all round. She seems to me to be nearing the end, even if she was lively there for a minute or two. Look.”
The panting dog was in bad shape. Her hair was tangled and matted from the salt water. There were ugly wounds on her haunches. All four feet were bleeding, and her ribs showed.
“First thing she needs is water and food.” He dug out a stone jug from the cart, poured water into a saucer, and placed it upon the ground. She limped over, drank up the plateful. And another, and another. The jug was nearly empty.
The girl watched their water supply vanish, yet felt gratitude to the dog for diverting the German patrol. She stroked the animal’s matted coat.
“Ah, la pauvre petite,” she exclaimed.
The Sergeant then rummaged through the cart, found some hard, stale bread, a half a bottle of milk, and an egg, part of the food for their journey. He broke the egg, mixed it all up in a kitchen basin, and put it down on the pavement. The dog gulped the food, precisely as the two men had gobbled that food brought them in the barn. She ate, drank, then sat down on her haunches, the left paw in the air.
More, please, she seemed to be saying.
The Sergeant picked her up in his arms. “No more now, lass. Later, maybe. And since you’re in no condition to walk, you’ll ride.”
He hoisted her up on the cart where she scrambled on top of a bundle of clothes tied up in a sheet, and crouched, paws forward, ready for anything. The Sergeant took up the handles of the cart, now heavier, and they moved along toward Calais. On top of the pile, the dog licked her bleeding paws.
Here the girl turned them off the main highway onto a small dirt road. She knew the region by heart, and by avoiding the larger roads, she explained, they could get around Marck. She kept talking about Marck. What was this Marck?
It was a town a few miles from Calais, full of German patrols, she explained. The back road they were on was longer, harder for pushing the cart than a paved highway, but safer. By twisting and turning on the back roads, they could eventually reach Coulogne, where her grandfather lived and where she was taking them.
“He is not like my mother, he does not hate the English. Also, he will care for your dog, if indeed he is there, if his house has not been wrecked by the fighting. Tell me, where did you find this poor beast?”
In his halting French the Sergeant explained how they had discovered the dog at Bergues, how she had attached herself to him.
Soon they were traversing a region that had seen heavy fighting, with an occasional dead horse in a field, a wrecked artillery caisson, here and there a house, pockmarked by bullets or reduced to a pile of rubble. Other refugees, too, had passed that way. On a stone road marker, someone had written in a childish hand:
“I have lost my dog, Lou-Lou. White terrier. Josette Bernard, rue de Dunkerque, Marck.”
The pace was slow, because the pebbly road made the cart difficult to push, although each man took turns between the shafts. At noon they paused under some poplars beside a tiny stream to eat. It was the trees, the Sergeant decided, that made the French roads such a pleasure. He loved the disciplined trees of France—the oak, the birch, the beech, the plane tree, the chestnut, and the poplar. Especially the tall, elegant poplars, edging road and river.
He refilled the stone water jug, gave the dog all she wanted to drink. Then he bathed her wounds with water, tied up the worst of them with bandages, hoisted her again to the top of the jolting cart. There she sat, paws forward, bandages around her flanks, surveying the procession, completely content to be with her people again.
Half an hour, an hour, on they went. Finally they reached a crossroads where a stone marker bore the sign: Calais par Coulogne, 5 k.
This was the back road they wanted, and there were but a few miles left. It was a winding country lane through tree-lined marshes on both sides. The Englishmen, pushing the heavily loaded cart, sweated in the hot sun. The dog panted on the pile of clothes. Nobody spoke; everyone was weary. On they went, the cart creaking and groaning beneath its heavy load. As they came to a sharp bend, there, unexpectedly, was the German army in battle dress advancing toward them.
The dog, knowing well friend from foe, gave two short, sharp barks.
On the right side of the road was a ruined and overturned Mark IV Panzer tank which half blocked their passage. To get by, someone had to give way, as there was not sufficient room for the files and the refugees to pass each other.
Instinctively the two Englishmen slowed down, intending to stand aside and wait. Not the girl. She sized the situation up and took command. “Allons” she ordered.
At the precise moment they reached the ruined tank, the head of the column, with an officer and non-com in front, arrived there also. Someone had to yield ground and it wasn’t that little Girl Scout.
Giving the officer a glance full of hatred that was not assumed, she tugged at her braids, tossed her head, and moved resolutely by. Less resolutely the English with the cart and the dog followed. It was a contest of wills. The officer started to wave them off the road, stopped, looked at her again, turned, hesitated, and gave an order to the Feldwebel. The non-com stood still, barked a command to the long column, which immediately swung to the edge as the girl pressed on.
There was real malevolence in her glance, a dislike of the invader all too plain. She did not disguise her feeling, and the Frenchiness of her was evident. It could not have been invented or assumed. To the officer, she was a native. So also were the men in sabots and smocks at her side.
Anyhow this was what the young Hauptmann decided as he stood under a poplar tree at the edge of the road watching them pass. He was tall, blond, with an agreeable face under his coal-scuttle helmet, trying hard to be liked. If he had any intention of checking their papers, the girl’s scornful look as she went by put it from his mind. Few men would have cared to accost her at that moment.
The troops beside the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood like a regiment being reviewed by a general officer. The dog half rose on her haunches at the top of the pile of clothes on the cart, and barked her distrust sharply. It was a convincing act, it was no act, it was the way the girl felt and the animal too. Her head in the air, the little figure in the khaki skirt stalked firmly past the German files standing beneath the poplar trees.
The Sergeant, less firmly, followed with the cart. He desired to imitate her look; it was not easy. Because here was a regiment on a route march exactly like his own. How often they too had lined the side of the road for a flock of sheep, a herd of cows, a farmer with a tractor or a mowing machine, waiting in much the same way as these men, to have them pass. These were soldiers, exactly like his regiment; the dependables, the casual ones, the shirkers, the timid youngsters trying not to show it, the youthful lieutenants, the older non-coms, the graying officer. It was interesting—and frightening, too.
He thought they would never reach the end of that column, every second he expected the officer to call out an order sharply and arrest them. Finally they came to the end. As they did, the dog half stood on the shaking cart, leaned back, and gave a lusty, hoarse bark. It was a perfect gesture of contempt toward the invaders.