Renni the Rescuer

by Felix Salten

  Kitty came in to see what it was all about. She stood facing Laddie, her tail twitching, to let him sniff her over. He did the job thoroughly. Then he looked at Tanya with a question in his eye. She stroked Kitty and preached him a sermon. “See this nice kitten, this darling kitten? You must be good to her! You must make friends with her! Will you?”

  Laddie listened closely, his head straight up and down, his big ears pricked up, his plume waving. Then, ducking down with his fore knees, he gave a short bark, challenging Kitty to play. She struck out at him with her soft paws and, as they started tearing around the room, she took the chance and sprang on his neck. He dropped to the floor. They rolled about together in a funny sham battle. They had made friends.

  Chapter XXI

  MEANWHILE GEORGE AND Renni had arrived at the railway station. Bettina and Vladimir followed them through the huge crowd which filled the great building to bursting.

  Crying of women, screaming of children, shouts of the soldiers, singing, echoes rolling madly down from the roof of iron and glass, whistling of locomotives, clanging of iron wheels, clashing of cars one against the other—the confusion bewildered, the gigantic noise deafened. A thick haze lay over the excited, frightened crowd. The evil smell of gasoline, of coal smoke, of clothing, of food, of beer, of bad tobacco, had a sort of stupefying effect. Every individual here was, in a way of speaking, extinguished. The soul was cramped and crushed. It seemed to shrivel, to creep into itself, no longer capable of effort.

  After the first few minutes George felt the brunt of this. Vladimir’s cheerful words fell on his ears without effect, slipped off his mind as if they had no meaning. Only Bettina’s glance caused a little twitching at his heart. Mechanically he kept hold on Renni, who crowded anxiously against him. He fought his way through the mass of humanity, swaying in waves of a feverish storm. Their resignation was broken by wails from the women, by loud cries from the men. They may have tried to seem assured, but they were really pursued by a secret fear.

  At the car he returned Vladimir’s handclasp only half-consciously. He held Bettina’s hand a moment, and heard her say, “Good-bye. Hurry home.”

  He did not know whether or not he answered her, but he helped Renni climb the steps.

  The train set itself slowly in motion, with a barely audible sound, for the singing and yelling of the soldiers and all the bedlam outside swelled into thunderous volume, and only the shrill whistle of the engine could be heard above it. The living wall of people, wildly waving farewell, was gradually left behind. Their voices died away, and the soldiers stopped calling to them out of the windows. The train rolled into the open country.

  The land lay fair in the soft sunshine, the peaceful peasant homes seemed to smile gently, the cattle grazed on the meadows, leafy trees lifted their tender green, doves fluttered in swarms, and from the church towers came the drone of bells broken by distance and the rumble of the train.

  For a while everyone kept silence, as though they all, stowed away in this car like baggage, realised of a sudden that now the partings had really been said, a farewell to their old peaceful existence, perhaps forever. And when the soldiers began to sing and to chatter, some still were silent, pensive, sunk in memories and dreams.

  Renni wore his Red Cross band on his back, George his on one arm. The men made way for them. The decision which meant war or peace had not come yet. But when George reached his destination, the rumour went round that the ultimatum from the opposing nation would expire tomorrow. The word “enemy” was heard now.

  Next morning came the order to march. So it was war!

  “It was bound to be,” they said. “It couldn’t be avoided.”

  In vain George racked his brain. Why should war be unavoidable? Why was it natural? He could think of no plausible reason. “I guess I don’t know enough about it. I’ve never thought these things out.” He stroked Renni. “Our job, old boy, is just to help the unfortunate. That’s what we’ll do, eh?”

  Renni made his full agreement known by the look in his eye and the wag of his tail.

  At Sanitary headquarters everything went as if by clockwork, like everything else in the army. George reported briefly, in a very businesslike manner. The orders he got were equally curt. A surgeon, a man no longer young, when he heard George’s name and Renni’s raised his head and said briefly, “I’ve heard of you.” That was all.

  A number of dogs, perhaps a score, were on hand, all with Red Cross bands. They waved their tails in welcome to one another, but stood quietly, without straining at the leashes, each beside his handler. Renni seemed visibly changed, more serious, less playful, perhaps not so affectionate as before, but dependable, and full of a tense expectancy.

  Nickel stepped up, tapped George on the shoulder. “The fun’s over now.” Renni and Hector exchanged greetings. “We and our dogs . . . ” Nickel blinked and tried to smile, but the effort ended in dismal failure.

  “There’ll be blood flowing, perhaps, before the day’s over . . . a lot of it. Well, as I always say, fate is fate.”

  George only nodded.

  • • •

  Finally came the word. Already the enemy had launched an invasion farther east, and orders were to march. The army moved over the border. Into the enemy country!

  These villages, these fields, these meadows! . . . So that was what the enemy country was like. It looked much like home. The peasant houses, the barns, the stables—all empty. Before the invasion they had evacuated them all. They had thrown up hasty embankments and dug ditches as tank traps. Scouts and engineers, sent out ahead, found the ditches and hurriedly tried to fill them. The barbed-wire entanglements were flattened out by the armoured cars and trucks.

  Then the artillery shells began to explode, sinking deep into the earth, hurling dirt high into the air, and human limbs and bodies with it. And as the dust and smoke thinned out, you could see them start slowly to fall back again to earth. Bodies lay around twisted into grotesque shapes. Even the hardiest shuddered at the sight.

  The first sacrifices to War.

  Then came the hollow droning of propellers. Enemy planes soared high overhead. They dropped low, dark missiles, which struck the earth and exploded with an ear-splitting detonation. A wicked sound. Earth and fragments of steel scattered everywhere. Anti-aircraft guns replied. Everyone looked for a shelter. George and Renni found one. “Thank God!” He thought he was saying it to himself, but he had said it aloud. The bellowing of the guns had drowned his voice. He reached out his hand for Renni, who pressed close against him, and patted him reassuringly, for the dog, realising that this was in deadly earnest, was trembling from head to foot.

  “There now, Renni,” George said, trying to cheer him. “Good old Renni, don’t be afraid!” Hardly had he spoken when he noticed that his own knees were shaking, that his throat was dry.

  A squadron flew out to meet the enemy and drive them off. A dogfight. Bark of machine guns, flashes from gun muzzles, whistle of falling bombs. Then an enemy plane staggered, slipped sidewise, crashed. A second turned nose down and dived sickeningly. Now one of their own fell. George in an excitement he could hardly control, was still fascinated by the magnificent show, a sort of drama of heroic grandeur. It was not for some time that he realised this spectacle was the ravaging of death. When the two squadrons drew apart, it struck him with full force, this dreadful thing that had happened here.

  A silence followed, shattered now and then by the rattling of tanks, by artillery fire, by the clash of weapons and the tread of tens of thousands. A moment of comparative quiet after the infernal tumult. A voice saying, “That was only the beginning, only a small beginning.”

  George turned around and saw a mass of pallid faces, some smiling convulsively, most of them staring straight ahead. He did not know who had spoken, but an echo in his heart kept repeating, “This is only the beginning, only a small beginning.”

  March, march, march.

  Evening began to fall, turned to darkness, a gloom wh
ich settled on everything, as though it wanted to cast a veil over the horrors of strife, over the bloody strife between men who did not know one another, who had never done anything to injure one another till this day. The stars twinkled peacefully in the heavens. The scent of freshly upturned earth hovered over their heads, mingled with the traces of burnt powder which drifted past from the exploded bombs and the fire from the anti-aircraft guns.

  But the sheltering gloom was of no avail. Rockets lighted up the sky, and searchlights stabbed the dark.

  Away at the very front infantry fire began to clatter. A quiver of expectancy ran along the ranks. No one asked a question, no one risked a guess.

  The firing ceased.

  March, march, march. Till late into the night. At last a few hasty bites of food, then the heavy sleep of exhaustion under the open sky. Renni, lying against George’s breast, sighed deeply, twice. He fell to dreaming, with the slack twitching of the legs, the high-pitched, choking whine that dreaming dogs are used to make. George did not awaken.

  Chapter XXII

  DAY 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.

  Chapter XXIII

  AT 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. Th
at 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.