"You don't know where Von Busche got hold of the dog, do you?" Brian asked.
"Only what his orderly told people, that it was in Flanders, close to some ruined, burnt-up château that he could hardly be forced to leave, though he was starving."
"I thought he'd get back there!" Brian said. "As for Von Busche—I wonder—but no! If it had been he the first time, would the dog have waited all those weeks for his revenge?"
"I don't understand," said the war correspondent.
"I don't myself," answered Brian. "But maybe the dog will manage to make me, some day. I was thinking—how I found him, tied to a table in a burning room. If Von Busche—— But anyhow, Sirius, you're no assassin! At worst, you're an avenger."
The dog leaped upon Brian at sound of the remembered name. Odd that three of his names, chosen by different men, should begin with "S"!
He's going to be an exciting passenger for the Becketts' car I foresee. But Brian can make him do anything, even to keeping quiet. And the trip can't go on a step without him now!
I felt that Jack Curtis had been hoping for a chance to speak with me alone—about Jim. But there was no such chance then. We were met by two of the British correspondents, and a French officer with a very high and ancient title, who was playing host (for France) to the newspaper men in this old château, once a convent. You see, the two cars had shot past as we walked; and by the time we reached the door preparations were being made for an impromptu party.
Never was a dinner so good, it seemed, and never was talk so absorbing. Some of it concerned an arch of honour or a statue to be placed over the spot where the first men of the American army fell in France: at Bethelmont; some concerned a road whose construction is being planned—a sacred road through Belgium and France, from the North Sea to Alsace; a road to lead pilgrims past villages and towns destroyed by Germany. This, according to the correspondents who were full of the idea, doesn't mean that the devastation isn't ultimately to be repaired. The proposal is, to leave in each martyred place a memorial for the eyes of coming generations: a ruined church; a burned château; the skeleton of an hôtel de ville, or a wrecked factory; a mute appeal to all the world: "This was war, as the Germans made it. In the midst of peace, Remember!"
Beneath my interest in the talk ran an undercurrent of my own private thought, which was not of the future, but of the past. I'd begun to wonder why I had been afraid of Jack Curtis. Instead of dreading words with him alone, I wished for them now.