In terrified amazement Pierrot stopped short and sniffed at his fallen comrade. Then Conrad urged him on again while the men cut the dead dog from the traces.
For the carbineers the battle was over for that day, but Pierrot had looked upon his dead and he began to understand.
IV
At length came the day of the evacuation of Antwerp, and the Belgian king and his brave but beaten army moved sorrowfully westward, leaving their fair land to suffer unprotected. The carbineers were sent on ahead with their battery, leaving the horse artillery and armoured motor cars and cavalry to cover the army’s retreat. Some of the troops went on railway trains through Ghent, Bruges, and Ostend, but for the most part the army, including the carbineers, was obliged to travel on foot.
It was a forced march, long and arduous. Seventy miles they covered in three days, sometimes keeping to the roads, sometimes cutting across country, but always hurrying on until it seemed to the dogs as though their legs would collapse and their lungs burst.
Once they came out upon the seashore, and Pierrot would have liked to tarry here and contemplate the new wonder, but always there seemed to be the need for haste and Conrad would not let him rest. They left behind them the pleasant farms and the wooded country and came at length to the land of canals and dykes and sand dunes, with queer, pollarded willows along the roadsides and canal banks. Also there was a great deal of rain and mud which made the hauling of the guns doubly difficult.
At last, weary and wretched, they came to a halt, and the dogs were allowed a brief rest while the ranks were reformed and the men established camps and dug trenches.
It was here that Pierrot occasionally saw soldiers in brown khaki who sang wild songs and spoke in a strange tongue but who seemed very friendly. A few of them came one day to visit the carbineers, and there was much handshaking and smoking, but very little conversation. They seemed particularly interested in the dogs, and one of them, a short, stocky fellow, with a very red face and a wide grin, strode among them as though he had been waiting for weeks to rub his hand up and down a dog’s back and pinch a dog’s ears. Jef remained coldly suspicious, but Pierrot wagged his stump tail violently and placed his muddy forepaws on the soldier’s broad chest. Whereupon the soldier gave Pierrot a stifling hug and a pat on the head and walked quickly away.