THE WAR DOGS' PARTY.
I am a plain dog that barks his mind and believes in calling a bone a bone, not one of your sentimental sort that allows the tail—that uncontrollable seat of the emotions—to govern the head. I voted Coalition, of course. As a veteran—three chevrons and the Croix de Guerre—I could hardly refuse to support the man who above all others helped us war dogs to beat the Bosch. But to say that I am satisfied with the way things are going on—that's a mouse of a very different colour, as the phrase goes. A terrier person who claims to own the PRIME MINISTER and has been very busy demanding what he calls our invaluable suffrages buttonholed me the other day outside the tripe shop and commenced to tell me all the wonderful things that we dogs would get if we only elected a strong Coalition Government—better biscuits, larger kennels, equal rabbits for all and I don't know what else. But when I asked him plainly, "Are you in favour of keeping out the dachshunds?" the fellow hedged and said the question was not so important as some people seemed to think, and that financial interests had to be considered.
And that's how the War Dogs' Party came to be formed, for when they heard how the land lay some of the influential dogs in our neighbourhood called a meeting in Jorrocks' Mews and elected me chairman. We decided that membership should not be confined to dogs who had actually seen service at the Front, but that any dog who had faced the trials of the War in the spirit of true patriotism should be eligible. A slight difficulty was encountered in the case of the Irish terrier who owns the butcher's shop and notoriously has never been on bone rations, some of the young hotheads claiming that he was not eligible. But Snap is a very popular dog, and when he is not brooding over his national grievances is a merry fellow and always ready to share a bone with a pal. So I ruled that on account of the historic wrongs of Ireland we would overlook Snap's defiance of the Public Bones Order and allow him to be one of us.
One of the first things you learn in the trenches is the use of tact in coping with delicate situations. Well, we drew up a very strong platform and were on the point of carrying it unanimously when our secretary, a clever fellow but temperamental, like all poodles, spotted the big yellow cat from No. 14 slinking down the street on some poisonous errand or other, and the meeting adjourned in what I can only describe as a disorderly manner. Of course we are treating the Declaration of Peace Aims, as we called it, as carried, though the secretary insists on adding a fifteenth point, which he says is of vital importance, relating to the Declawing of Yellow Cats.
The first plank in our platform is BRITAIN FOR BRITISH DOGS, which sounds very well, don't you think? Sassafras, the Aberdeen terrier from No. 3, a solid fellow but unimaginative, wanted it to be ONCE A U-DOG ALWAYS A U-DOG, but I ruled that that couldn't be right because once there had been a U-dog next door to us, but now there wasn't. Of course they all wanted to hear about it, but we war dogs are supposed to be as modest as we are brave, so I simply said that he was spurlos versenkt. But it isn't only German dogs we draw the line at. Take the Pekinese. I've always said if we didn't combat the Yellow Peril we'd regret it, and now the pests are everywhere. My master's woman has one which she calls Pitti Sing. Did you ever hear of such a name for a dog? But then it isn't a dog in the real sense of the word. Only last Friday the little beast flew at me—all over an absurd chicken bone which was really meant for me but had been put on to its plate by mistake—and deliberately filled my mouth full of nasty fluffy fur.
Of course the woman had to come in at that moment and, instead of chastising the little monster, she grabbed it up and hugged it, saying, "Diddums nasty great dog bite um poor ickle Pitti Singums?" and a lot more silly rot equally at variance with the facts. I wagged my tail at her to show it wasn't my fault, but she just wouldn't see reason and told master that I must have a good whipping. Of course master and I both know that one isn't whipped for a little thing like that, so we retired into the study, and while master pretended to whip me I pretended to howl. I was just beginning to howl in a very lifelike way when the woman rushed in and called master a cruel brute, and said she didn't mean him to hurt me really.
Women are funny creatures and I'm glad I don't own one. Snap, the butcher's dog, even went so far as to suggest that we should adopt anti-feminism as a plank in our platform, but the Irish Wolfhound who comes from Cavendish Square said that his mistress was driving an ambulance in France and that, in her absence, anyone who had anything to say against women would have to see him first. Of course it's very difficult to argue with that kind of dog, and, though Snap seemed inclined to press the point, I ruled the proposal out of order. The value of resource is one of the things you learn in the Army.
I think Snap was rather relieved really, because after the meeting he asked me to go and help him dig up a nearly new mutton bone that he had buried under a laurel bush in the Square.
Well, to return to our platform, what we say about these foreign dogs is "Keep them all out." Of course there are some Allied dogs, like Poodles and Plumpuddings and Boston terriers, that have earned the right to be considered one of ourselves, but when it comes to having Mexican Hairless and Schipperkes and heaven knows what else coming into the country and taking the biscuits out of our mouths—well, we say it isn't good enough. Not that we're insular, mind you, but to hear some of these mangy foreigners talking about the Brotherhood of Dogs! But I must tell you how Bolshevism raised its ugly head in our midst. It was while we were discussing the second plank in our platform, which is "DOGS, NOT DOORMATS."