The Bomber Dog (9 page)

The flooded river's current was so
strong that Grey had no chance of swimming against it, and with the parachute still
attached and no way for him to remove it, he was in very grave danger of
drowning.

He tried and tried to reach the bank,
but the rushing river refused to let him. The parachute weighed him down and finally
he was too exhausted to fight the river any more. He stopped trying and let the
rushing water carry him away, his head sinking under the water as he was pulled
down.

Suddenly, however, he
was stopped by a sharp jolt. The parachute strings had caught on the branch of a
fallen tree, which stopped his progress down the river. Grey was able to half
clamber on to the tree and cling there. All night he held on, shivering and wet. All
night he waited for Nathan to find him.

By the time the sun rose Grey was half
delirious. He was so cold and so tired and so lost without Nathan. He slipped in and
out of consciousness, and when he finally did hear voices they seemed to be coming
from very far away.

‘
Un chien!
' Claude
cried, pointing at the dog in the river.

He and Sabine ran towards it, but as she
ran Sabine was worried the dog would be dead, and she couldn't bear for this
war to take any more lives.

‘Be careful,' Claude begged
her as Sabine
crawled out along the branch of the tree and found
herself staring into a pair of terrified blue eyes.

‘It's all right,' she
said softly. ‘It's all right. I'm going to set you
free.'

The dog was so weak she had to be
careful the current didn't drag him away once the parachute that was trapping
and also supporting him was released.

‘Get Luc,' she shouted to
her brother. ‘And then run home and bring the cart.' The dog
didn't look strong enough to walk and he'd be too heavy for them to
carry home.

Luc's family was part of the
French Resistance too.

Sabine was frightened for Luc and
Claude, and for herself, but she knew, also, that they had to help the Allies if
France was ever to regain its freedom.

Luc was fourteen and lived on the farm
next to theirs. He was very quiet and shy – sometimes
he barely
said a word all day – but he was also very strong and Sabine was glad when he came
running to help.

As she carefully unravelled the
parachute strings she gave them to Luc to hold on to so that if the dog were dragged
away by the current he'd be able to pull him back.

Claude ran up, breathless, pulling the
hand cart, but it wasn't needed. Luc cradled the dog in his arms, holding Grey
close to him to keep him warm. Grey shivered with shock, cold and exhaustion as Luc
told him he would be safe now. He couldn't understand the boy's words,
but he knew the tone of Luc's voice meant comfort and security, warmth and
love.

Luc carried Grey all the way back to
Sabine and Claude's farmhouse and laid him gently on a blanket in front of the
fire while Claude ran to fetch more sticks to build up the flames. Sabine knelt
beside the dog and stroked him.

They were still kneeling beside Grey
when
Sabine and Claude's mother came back from the
market.

She gasped when she saw the large dog
lying fast asleep in front of the fireplace. Grey was the first dog they'd had
in their house since France had become occupied and their own German Shepherd dog
and her puppies had been confiscated by German soldiers. His sable colouring was
different from that of the puppies they'd lost, but seeing him brought back a
lot of memories.

Sabine told her all about what had
happened and how they'd found Grey.

‘You shouldn't have brought
him here,' her mother scolded. But Sabine knew she didn't truly mean it.
Their mother was well aware that the war had made all three children more
independent and grown-up than they would otherwise have been.

‘Luc helped us,' Claude
added. ‘But Sabine crawled out along the branch over the
river …'

Sabine gave her
brother a ‘be quiet' look and their mother gave Sabine a
‘we'll talk about this later' one.

‘We have to keep him
hidden,' Sabine said. ‘He was wearing a parachute …'

Sabine's mother nodded. She
removed Grey's collar with its identification tag that bore his name, number
and regiment.

‘His name's Grey,' she
said, and she put the collar and ID tag in a pottery jar on the mantelpiece, so Grey
couldn't be identified as a British dog if he were captured by the
Germans.

Grey awoke to find himself on some
sacking and a blanket in front of a roaring fire. He tried to sit up but a soft
voice spoke soothingly, and a gentle hand pushed him back down.

‘Rest,' Sabine told him, and
he went back to sleep, only to wake again an hour later.

‘Get the dog some ragout,'
Sabine's mother instructed her, and Sabine hurried to ladle some stew into a
bowl.

‘Not too much –
little and often is better for a dog in his condition,' her mother added.
‘And make sure it's cool enough before you give it to him.'

‘I know.' Sabine said.
She'd never be foolish enough to give a dog hot food which might burn its
mouth.

Grey lapped at the unfamiliar-smelling
food, found he liked it, and licked the bowl clean. Then he looked up at Sabine for
more.

Sabine laughed and stroked his head.

‘Maybe some more later,' she
said.

The dog would be better in no time at
this rate. She squeezed her mother's hand.

‘A good appetite is a good
sign,' her mother agreed.

Claude came in with more wood for the
fire and Sabine told him the good news.

‘He's going to be OK,'
she said, her eyes shining.

That night they left Grey by the fire to
sleep
but later Sabine crept downstairs to lie beside the dog and
Claude came to join her.

Although he was exhausted from his
night-long ordeal in the river, and his muscles ached from clinging to the branch
for so long, Grey was not otherwise injured and once he awoke he tried to stand. He
needed to find Nathan but his legs crumpled and he lay back down.

‘Shh, hush now,' Sabine told
him, as Grey whined.

She stroked him gently and softly sang a
lullaby to him and he sank back into sleep, his body twitching as he remembered the
jump the night before.

When the cock crowed at sunrise Madame
Dubois came down the stairs to find her children fast asleep with the British German
Shepherd from the river lying contentedly between them.

His eyes were open and he looked at
her.

‘You look very
comfortable,' she told him. ‘Very comfortable indeed.'

Grey's tail slapped up and down
once on the stone-tiled floor, as if he were agreeing with her.

Sabine rubbed her eyes as Claude
snuggled closer into Grey's soft fur.

‘Good morning,' Sabine said
sleepily, and the dog licked her face.

They all froze instinctively when there
was a thump at the door.

‘One moment,' Madame Dubois
called. There was no time to hide the dog.

Thinking quickly, Sabine pulled a rug
from the back of an armchair and laid it over Grey.

Claude went to the door and opened it as
Sabine held her breath.

Outside stood Luc.

‘How's the dog?' he
asked them.

Sabine lifted the rug and Luc hurried
over to the dog he'd helped to save.

Grey's tail
flapped slowly up and down as Luc sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of
him. Although he'd barely been conscious when they'd found him, Grey
recognized the smell of the boy who had cradled him and carried him here. Luc
tentatively reached out a hand and softly stroked Grey's fur.

‘His name's Grey,'
Sabine told him.

Later that day, Grey had recovered enough
for Sabine and Claude to take him on his first tour of what was left of their farm
after the last German raid just over a month ago.

The farm's horse and donkey had
both been taken and Eva, their one cow, had gone too although none of them had
actually seen the Germans take her. The cart their mother and father used for taking
produce to market was also missing.

Their pigs had been killed and eaten
during the few days that the German soldiers had
camped close by.
Most of the chickens had also gone and it was a miracle that the cockerel had
somehow managed to escape and continued to wake them up each morning by crowing
loudly on his perch.

Somehow the goose had got away too. It
waddled over as they walked around the cobbled farmyard and it hissed at Grey. The
dog was startled, and gave a low growl.

‘Leave him, Grey,' Sabine
warned as the goose wisely headed off to the duck pond.

It was a hot and humid summer day and
the children led Grey out of the farmyard and down a muddy track to a shallow part
of the river where they liked to swim and paddle.

‘Come and join us,' Claude
called to Grey, as he and Sabine splashed about in the water.

But Grey hadn't forgotten his last
watery experience. He stayed on the bank and whined. Then suddenly he went deathly
still, as he'd been taught to do by Nathan during his infantry
training. He looked over to the left where a sound had come
from.

Sabine looked too and saw three German
soldiers heading down the road. The river was in a dip and they were just able to
scramble out on the other side and hide in the bushes before the soldiers arrived.
The men stopped in the spot where they'd been playing only moments before.

Sabine and Claude hardly dared to
breathe as they watched the soldiers take off their helmets, pull off their boots
and socks and paddle into the water.

The children kept perfectly still,
hoping that Grey wouldn't give away their hiding place. The soldiers would not
be pleased if they thought they'd been spying on them, but they needn't
have worried about Grey. He kept perfectly still as the soldiers cooled their feet
and then sat on the river bank chatting in German before continuing on their way
nearly an hour later.

Sabine and Claude
breathed a sigh of relief once they'd gone. That had been much too close.
Claude stroked Grey's head.

‘I don't want to lose him.
His coat is so beautiful, like a grey wolf's,' he said.

‘It's called sable,'
Sabine said. But she agreed with him that the German soldiers would want the dog if
they saw him. Maybe they could disguise him somehow so he looked less like a
military dog and more like a farm dog.

‘As long as he doesn't look
good to the Germans they're not going to want him – are they?' she said,
thinking hard.

Claude looked at Grey's beautiful
grey – no, sable – and white coat and his proud head. There was something almost
regal about him. It wasn't going to be easy to fool the Germans.

‘Come on, I've got an
idea,' Sabine said.

They hurried back to the farm, where
Sabine proceeded to rub mud into Grey's fur, along with bits of old pig
manure.

‘He'll
stink!' Claude protested.

‘Good, then no one will want to
come near him, will they?' Sabine said.

Claude opened his mouth and then closed
it again.

‘Good idea,' he
muttered.

Next, Sabine took an old matted
sheep's fleece from the chicken house, covered it in mud and tied it on Grey
with some string.

‘It's for his own
good,' Sabine told Claude, as the boy held his nose and then started to
laugh.

‘What is it?' she asked,
crossly.

‘Now he's really like a wolf
in sheep's clothing,' Claude told her.

Madame Dubois stared at the dog in
horror when they took him into the kitchen.

‘What have you done to him?'
she gasped.

The dog hardly looked like himself any
more. The fleece bulked him out, making him look misshapen, and he smelt
terrible.

‘It's his
disguise,' Sabine replied.

‘A wolf in sheep's
clothing,' said Claude.

Madame Dubois nodded. It wouldn't
fool anyone on close inspection, of course, but from a distance … from a
distance it might.

‘I need you to take this food out
to the old barn at the turnpike,' she said as she put the last of what little
she could spare into a basket.

Sabine and Claude nodded. It
wasn't the first time they'd taken supplies to soldiers who were trying
to help France. They'd also hidden men in the chicken coop and the stable. So
far they'd never had to use the rabbit hutch their father had made before he
left to take a more active part in the Resistance with the French army.

‘Come, Grey,' Sabine said as
she took the basket of food from her mother.

Madame Dubois was glad her children had
Grey to protect them. Although he hadn't been
with them for
very long, having a dog around had rekindled all the old feelings she'd had
about the ones she'd lost. The children had been so upset when the puppies and
their mother had been taken by the German soldiers four years ago and she relished
their joy at spending time with a dog again. Plus he added to the authenticity of
their disguise. After all, what was so unusual about two children with very large
appetites and their smelly, odd-looking dog, going off on a picnic for the day?

Grey sniffed the air as he trotted along
after Sabine and Claude. He couldn't detect so much as a faint trace of
Nathan's scent as they hurried across the fields to the old barn.

They didn't see any German
soldiers as they ran, but when they reached the straw-filled barn and went inside it
looked as though the Allied soldiers must have gone too.

‘Hello?' said Claude.

‘We've
brought food,' Sabine announced, into the seemingly empty space.

Grey looked at a particular spot, his
head tilted to one side. He put his paw out and rested it on top of a lump in the
straw and a British soldier emerged from it, brushing stalks of wheat off his
shoulders.

‘It's OK,' the soldier
said to the other man who was hidden in the barn. ‘It's just some
children and their foul-smelling dog.'

‘He's not smelly,'
Sabine said. ‘That's his disguise. Underneath he's beautiful and
very clean from all the time he spent in the river.'

‘Our mother took his collar off in
case the Germans caught him and shot him,' Claude added.

The British soldiers looked at each
other and shrugged. The children were making very little sense but they were too
tired from their mission and sleeping rough in the barn to question them more about
their dog.

‘Let's see
what's in that food basket,' the first soldier said. While Sabine and
Claude took out the food they'd brought with them, Grey slipped silently out
of the back of the barn.

By the time Sabine, Claude and the
soldiers looked round for him, Grey had gone.

His strong sense of smell and the
tracking skills he'd been taught led him back to the part of the river where
Sabine and Claude had first found him. But Nathan wasn't there. Then he ran on
to the place where he'd come down in the parachute drop. But Nathan
wasn't there either.

He sniffed at the air in all directions
and ran in a large circle as he tried to pick up Nathan's scent. He pawed and
sniffed the ground, but Nathan had landed more than five miles away and there was no
scent trail of him here.

Grey threw back his head and howled up
at the sky. It was the last place he'd seen his friend.

Sabine and Claude
spent the rest of the day looking for Grey and finally returned to the farmhouse
without him at dusk.

‘We searched everywhere,'
Claude told his mother, defeated.

‘He must have gone back to the
soldiers,' Sabine said.

They were startled when a moment later
Luc burst through the door.

‘German soldiers,' he
gasped. ‘Coming!'

First they'd come to Luc's
farm, where the squawking of the guinea fowl had alerted Luc to the fact that there
were intruders. As soon as he realized what was happening, he'd dropped the
bucket of grain he was about to feed to them and ran as fast as he could through the
trees to warn Sabine and Claude to hide Grey. But now he found that Grey had
gone.

‘We've been looking for him
all day,' Sabine said desperately.

At least the German
soldiers couldn't take him if he were missing.

‘We have no British soldiers
hiding here,' Madame Dubois insisted to the German soldiers who pushed their
way roughly past her. They'd had a report of British spies in the area, and
although most such reports led nowhere, each of them needed to be investigated.

Claude's eyes went to the small
pottery jar on the shelf above the fireplace. If the soldiers looked inside it they
would find Grey's ID tags and know that although they might not have been
helping the British soldiers, they had helped the British soldiers' dog. And
that would be enough to get them all into serious trouble.

Sabine saw where Claude's wide
eyes were looking and gave the slightest flick of her head to tell him not to keep
staring at the jar. Claude tried his best not to, but it was very hard to drag his
eyes away. He'd never been so scared
before – he felt that
he couldn't breathe – he felt he might faint.

Upstairs they could hear the soldiers
stomping about, throwing over furniture, tapping on walls to see if there were any
hidden panels and opening drawers.

Having found nothing, they came
clattering back down the stairs.

‘
Monsieur
, look!'
Luc said to the first of them.

‘What is it?' the soldier
demanded.

Luc pointed through the window into the
distance. ‘I saw someone. He was running …'

The soldiers pushed roughly past him and
headed off down the road and away from the farm after the person Luc pretended to
have seen.

Once the German soldiers had gone, Luc
returned home, picked up the grain bucket he'd dropped and fetched more grain
for the guinea fowl. Without their early warning there
might not
have been time to alert Sabine and Claude before the German soldiers arrived.

‘
Merci
,' he said as
he scattered the grain.

The birds pecked it up and then went
back to their lookout wall.

At the Dubois farm Sabine took
Grey's collar and ID tags from the pottery jar and threw them in the fire.
They were too dangerous to keep.