Renni the Rescuer (20 page)

D
AY 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.

A
T LAST THERE CAME A day when the murderous roar of battle died down and that night it ceased entirely.

The quiet was uncanny, disturbing. Still a deep sigh of relief passed through the ranks. All around, near and far, great fires were burning, dyeing the black sky with red reflections. The steady march forward paused for a while.

On the verge of exhaustion, George and his comrades of the Sanitary Corps, with the rear guard of the army,
made their way to a small town which had been partly destroyed. Many of the houses were heaps of ruins; others had one side torn off, or whole stories cut in half, with what had once been rooms jutting out into the open air.

But it was the next day before they noted this destruction. That night when they marched in, it was quite dark, for the light plant was in ruins. Nobody knew or cared what shape the little town was in. Here was the luxury of which they had been long deprived. Within them was only one desire, driving out every other thought. Sleep! Sleep!

When George and Renni awoke they found themselves in what must have been a showroom. Empty counters, a long desk, but no chairs, benches or tables.

Other trainers and their dogs were still asleep. When they began to awaken they looked around in a sort of daze, stretched out comfortably again on the smooth floor boards and took a long time about getting up.

“At least it's dry here,” someone called. No one answered, no one laughed. They had lost the knack of laughter. Two or three, George among them, got up to
look through the building and see if there were anyone around. It was all as empty as the showroom in which they had spent the night. Whoever had lived here had fled.

In one story after another the apartments seemed practically unharmed. On the second floor a wire-haired fox terrier flew at George, snapping his teeth, and then immediately ran behind the bed, where he lay whimpering in fear. George tried to coax him out with friendly words, but the terrier snarled angrily. Then Renni lay down flat on the floor, stuck his muzzle under the bed—there wasn't room for more of him in the narrow space. He must have whispered something soothing to the shy, frightened animal. The terrier crept out, a changed dog. He played gaily with Renni and made no resistance when George took him in his arms.

“You poor, lost puppy!” said George. “You've a right to be surly when strangers come bursting in this way. But we're not strangers any longer, are we? You're not lost now and we'll all be good friends together—you, Renni and I.”

The terrier listened with a look of deep wisdom on his face and his stubby ears pricked up. He had been sick with lonesomeness, but now seemed suddenly free, perfectly happy at having company again. In a few minutes he was eating and drinking greedily; he must have been tortured by hunger and thirst for days.

They went on exploring the house. George found a bathroom and seized the welcome chance of a bath for himself and Renni. They needed it after these weeks of dirt. There were plenty of soap and towels.

When they went down again to the display-room the dogs were holding a get-acquainted party.

“Do you understand what's going on?” Renni asked Hector. He thought of him as an old friend and had great respect for his wisdom because he was so much older.

“Nobody can understand it,” Hector answered. “I've never seen anything like it.”

Another dog said, “We're a long way from home. Far from everything we've been used to. How can we take it?”

Still another chimed in. “It isn't the way it used
to be. These things used to last only three days. Now there's no end to the business.”

Renni added, “In the old days some would be bleeding but only a few. Now everyone we find is that way.”

Hector said, sad and worried, “And most of them are dead, and we can't help them at all. I never saw any dead before this. It's a terrible thing to see the dead.”

“You get used to it,” put in an old dog with unusually long ears.

“No,” contradicted Renni, “I can never get used to it.”

“Nor I.”

“I know I can't,” Hector asserted.

“I only said that to make you feel better,” Long-Ears assured them. “The sight and scent of the dead really fill me with fear and horror.”

“Why in the world do they do such things?” sighed Renni.

“I believe they've all gone crazy,” was Hector's opinion.

“Impossible,” said Long-Ears. “How could they all go crazy at once?”

“Perhaps it's contagious.”

“Nothing of the sort. They're simply fighting one another.”

“Fighting for what? Don't they have food, homes—everything they want? . . . Why should they fight?”

Long-Ears wrinkled his nose scornfully. “What about us? Each of us has food, a home, pretty much everything he wants, and yet we've all been in plenty of fights, haven't we?”

“Yes,” Renni admitted, “but that's different.”

“Well, we're only dogs.”

Renni said, “We dogs fight only when we're insulted, or when we're challenged, or when we're attacked.”

“There must have been a strange lot of terrible insults and challenges going around to call for huge fights like these,” said Hector. “They have been getting ready for them a long time. Otherwise we wouldn't have learned our business and practised at it. Such things must be secrets of a high order. Anyhow, they're beyond me.”

Fox sat on his haunches in their midst, listening tensely, the richer for their remarkable experiences.

•  •  •

Meanwhile the dog-trainers were talking things over. Young Wier pounded with his fist on the desk which served for a table, so that the metal plates and tin cups danced and clattered. “We're winning! We're winning! That's all that matters.” He pulled his dog over to him and roared in his ear, “Do you hear? Rascal, do you hear? Victory is ours!”

Rascal stood limp under the hands of his master, who now began to sing a soldier song. He sang alone, with only the accompaniment of Rascal's yelps and Fox's barking. Wier let go his dog, stopped singing and looked around. “Why don't you join in?”

Marly shrugged his shoulders.

Greenow, a thoughtful man, said, “Maybe we're thinking of the lives it costs.”

“But so long as we're winning, it's worth all it costs, isn't it?” Wier demanded.

Greenow answered earnestly, “Yes . . . if we always win . . . perhaps.”

“Well,” Nickel remarked, “I guess a man might think
that, so long as he isn't a part of the cost himself.” He glanced around. “Who knows whether we're going to stay here long enough to get a good rest?” No one knew.