“In how several ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us!”—Michel de Montaigne.

The war-baby was very dear and downy when we first saw her.

She is the daughter of a Chinaman (an important member of the household), and a neighbouring lady. The Chinaman was, in fact, so important that the usual matrimonial procedure was reversed in his case; and the family of the lady made unabashed and persevering advances for his favour before he could be induced to condescend to the alliance.

Anyone familiar with Oriental calm will not be surprised to learn that the potentate received with imperturbability the announcement that his lady wife was likely to present him with a family. It was, however, perhaps pushing Eastern reserve a little too far to walk away from his infants with every appearance of disgust, and to threaten to bite those officious friends who sought to extract some show of parental feeling from him by turning him round once more to confront the seething cradle-full.

The cradle was a flat basket, in which the babies maintained a ceaseless movement, crawling one over the other, with a total disregard of such sensitive portions of the anatomy as eyes and noses. They were extraordinarily ill matched as to size—we do not know if this is usual with triplets—looking more like a job lot of Teddy-bears than anything else. There was one as large as the other two put together; there was a very lively medium one; and a very small third, who lay and feebly squirmed under the others vigorous toes. They all had beautiful black noses and little cream-coloured tails tightly curled over their backs. The intelligent reader will by this time have perceived that we are not referring to mere humanity. The war-babies belong to the race of Pekinese, being, in fact, the offspring of the celebrated and priceless Loki, master of the Villino of that name, who fame has already spread far and wide.

His consort was Maud, a chestnut-haired lady, who, we regret to say, had already contracted a mÉsalliance with a highlander, to the despair of her family. We are convinced that the union is regarded by Loki as a mere matter of politics, but what Western would ever dare to penetrate the barrier of relentless reserve which the Manchu raises between his domestic affairs and the foreign devil? We fear, by his expression and the looks of reproach with which he has since regarded us, that we have already gravely infringed his ideas of decorum by bringing his daughter to dwell in his house.

She is the only daughter of the trio, the two extremes having run to the masculine gender. We chose her on account of her perkiness and her engaging manner of waving her paws in supplication or allurement.

These little dogs have all of them more or less the gift of gesticulation. It is not necessary to teach them either to beg or pray. The puppy—Plain Eliza—will dance half the length of the room on her hind-legs, frantically imploring with her front paws the while, with a persistency and passion that would melt a heart of stone.

The other day, when the butler walked on the paw of Mimosa, the Peky nearest to her in age, who rent the air with her yells, Plain Eliza instantly rose on her hind-legs and added her lamentations. One can truly say that at the same time she wrung her paws in distress over her playmate’s suffering. She has a very feeling heart.

These two adore each other, which is a very good thing, because Mimosa is really a little Tartar. She is the first fur-child to bring discord into the happy family at Villino Loki, and to break the Garden of Eden spell by which cats and dogs of all sizes and tempers dwell together in the most complete amity and sympathy. A small, imperious person of a vivid chestnut hue, with devouring dark eyes and the most approved of snub noses, we flatter ourselves that Mimosa will become a beauty when she gets her full coat. But she will not stand cats, still less a kitten, anywhere within the kitchen premises, and Mrs. MacComfort, the queen of those regions, has actually banished the beloved Kitty and her offspring to the greengrocer’s shop in order to pander to Mimosa, who regarded them much as the honest Briton the alien Hun—something darkly suspicious, to be eliminated from the community at all costs. Mimosa, indeed, has taken matters into her own paws, as the man in the street has done, and Mrs. MacComfort has acted like the Government. Discovering the youngest kitten completely flattened under Mimosa—the latter, her mane bristling, endeavouring to tear off all her victim’s fur—it was decided to remove the alien element for its own benefit.

Harmony is now restored to kitchen dominions. The other morning the young lady of the Villino found the two little dogs solemnly seated each side of the hearth, their eyes fixed on an infinitesimal earthenware pan which was simmering on a carefully prepared fire.

“They’re just watching me cooking their breakfast, miss,” said Mrs. MacComfort in her soft voice. “They’re very partial to chicken liver.”

It was sizzling appetizingly in its lilliputian dish.

From the moment of Plain Eliza’s entrance upon the scene, squirming in a basket, Mimosa showed a profound and affectionate interest in her. We were, if truth be told, a little afraid to trust these demonstrations, fearing they might be of a crocodile nature, but never was suspicion more unjust. The elder puppy has completely adopted the younger one, and is full of anxiety and distress if she is not in her company. She will come bustling into the room, talking in her Peky way, saying as plainly as ever a little dog did: “Has anyone seen Baby? It’s really not safe to let the child go about by herself like that.”

When she discovers her, the two small things kiss and embrace; after which Mimosa abdicates her grown-up airs, and romping becomes the order of the day.

The name of Plain Eliza is the one which has stuck most distinctively to the great Mo-Loki’s daughter. It seemed appropriate to her, in the opinion of the mistress of the Villino, and arose out of a reminiscence of her Irish youth. There happened to be in Dublin society in those far-back days a young lady of guileless disposition, not too brilliant intellect, and what Americans would call “homely” appearance. Presenting herself at a reception at a house which boasted of a very pompous butler, and having announced her name as Eliza Dunn, he forthwith attempted to qualify her with a title.

“Lady Eliza Dunn?”

“No, no,” quoth she. “Plain Eliza.”

Rumour would have it that he thereupon announced in stentorian tones: “Plain Eliza.”

It is not so much the uncomeliness of the Baby’s countenance as the guileless trustfulness with which she turns it upon the world which seems to make the name appropriate. Anyhow, it has come to stay.

The little children that run about Villino Loki these days—war-exiles, most of them—have scarcely crossed the threshold before their voices are uplifted, calling:

“Plain! Plain! Where is Plain Eliza?” And when the favourite is found there is much cooing and fond objurgations of: “Darling Plain! My sweet little Plain! Dear, darling, Plain Eliza!”

She is the only one of the Pekies that can be allowed with perfect safety in the hands of the children. Mimosa is uncertain, and may turn at any moment with a face of fury, her whole body bristling. She is secretly very jealous of the children. And Loki is not uncertain at all. He has never hidden his dislike of them, and his lip begins to curl the instant a small hand is outstretched towards him. But Plain Eliza, if bored, remains patient and gentle; and however “homely” she may seem to her attached family, she is all beauty and charm in the eyes of their little visitors.

Recently a most attractive child was for ten days, with her charming young mother and baby brother, the guest of the Villino. To console her on departure she was promised another Plain Eliza, should such a one ever be vouchsafed the world. Her mother writes: “She prays and makes me pray for the new Plain Eliza every day, and I think fully expects to see her come shooting down from Heaven.”

A very dear child this, with a heart and mind almost too sensitive for her four years. Many delicately pretty sayings are treasured of her. She must have been about three when her first religious instruction was given her. It made a profound impression. For months afterwards she would date her experiences from the day of this enlightenment.

“You know, mammy, that was before Jesus was born to me!”

Her father is at the front. He has not yet seen his little son, the arrival of whom was so much desired. This baby, an out-of-the-way handsome, healthy child, is a prey to the terrors which it will be yet mercifully many years before he can understand. He cannot bear to be left alone a moment, and wakes from a profound sleep in spasms of unconscious apprehension. Then nothing can soothe him but being clasped very close, the mother’s hand upon the little head, pressing it to her cheek. “He is nothing,” said the doctor, “to some of the babies I have seen this year.” It is not astonishing; but how pathetic! These little creatures, carried so long under an anguished heart, come into the world bearing the print of the universal mystery already stamped on their infant souls.

When will the dawn arise over a world no longer agonized and disrupted? When will the wholesome joys and the natural sorrows resume their preponderance in our existence? Surely every man’s own span holds enough of trouble to make him realize that here is not our abiding-place, and long for the security of the heavenly home. Perhaps it was not so. Perhaps we had all fallen away too much from faith and simplicity, and we needed this appalling experience of what humanity can inflict upon humanity, when Christ and His cross are left out of the reckoning.

“The world has become profoundly corrupt. There will surely come some great scourge. It will be necessary to have a generation brought up by mourning mothers and in a discipline of tears,” said a man of God in what seemed words of unbearable severity, a year before the war broke out.

So it may be that we are not only fighting for our children, to deliver them from the intolerable yoke of the Hun, but that we are also suffering for our children, to deliver them from the punishment of our own sins.

We meant to call this chapter “War-babies,” only for the newspaper discussion which has made even innocence itself the subject of passionate and unpleasant discussion.

There have been a good many war-babies in the neighbourhood as well as Plain Eliza. The Signorina of the Villino has already acted godmother several times to infant exiles. These little ones, we thank Heaven, have arrived surprisingly jolly and unimpressed. Yet the poor mothers had, most of them, fled from the sound of the cannon and the menace of the shells, happy if they saw nothing worse than the flames which were consuming their homes and all that those homes held and meant for them. The Signorina is very particular that the girls should be called Elizabeth and the boys Albert, with due loyalty to a sovereignty truly royal in misfortune.

“Mademoiselle,” writes one young woman, “I have the happiness to announce to you that I have the honour to have become the mother of a beautiful little daughter.”

She meant what she said—marvellous as it may seem not to regard the event in such circumstances as an added anguish!

We have heard of the birth of a child to a widow of eighteen—a peasant girl in Brussels—who was forced by the invaders not only to watch her father and husband and both brothers struck down under her eyes, but to assist in burying them while they were still breathing.

“It is a very ugly little baby,” writes the kind lady who is its godmother, “and the poor mother is very ill. When she gets better it will be a comfort to her.”

In these days, when the lid of hell has been taken off—as Mr. Elbert Hubbard, one of the victims of the Lusitania, graphically declared—when legions of devils have been let loose upon an unsuspecting world, the case of the eighteen-year-old peasant woman in the Brussels asile is by no means the most to be pitied. Her child will be a comfort to her. Not so will it be with the many unfortunate Belgian village mothers—to whom children are being, we hear, born maimed in awful testimony of the mutilations which the wives have been forced to witness deliberately inflicted on their husbands. War-babies, indeed! Stricken before birth, destined to bear through a necessarily bitter existence the terrible mark of the barbarian foe.

Let us get back to the fur children. It is such a comfort to be able to turn one’s eyes upon something that can never understand the horror about one.

Plain Eliza’s only trick is to put her front paws together, palm to palm, in an attitude of prayer, and wave them. This is called in the family “making pretty paws.” When the children plunge for her and clasp her close, the first cry is always: “Plain Eliza, make pretty paws! Dear Plain Eliza, make pretty paws!”

She will not do it for them every day. Little dogs know very well that human puppies have no real authority over them. Perhaps it is because of the rarity of her condescension in this direction, or perhaps because of the wonderful emphasis of her supplication when she does so condescend, that the youngest of the small exiles, three-year-old Viviane, regards this accomplishment as the very acme of expression. She is a pious babe, and is fond of paying visits to the little Oratory in the Villino. One day her governess observed her wringing and waving her dimpled hands before the altar. When she came out she confided in tones of devout triumph: “I have been making pretty paws to little Jesus.”

Viviane, the most satisfactory type of sturdy childhood it is possible to imagine, combines a great determination, an understanding as solid as her own little person, with an extremely tender heart. She quite realizes the advantages of the good manners which her English governess inculcates, and she can be heard instructing herself in a deep sotto voce when she sits at tea with grown-up entertainers.

“Vivi not speak with her mouth full. Vivi wait. Now Vivi can speak.”

“Good-bye, my little girl,” said her mother to her the other day, sending the child home in advance to her early supper. “I hope you will be good.”

“Vivi good,” was the prompt response, “good, obedient, nice manners at table.”

She walked out of the room with her peculiarly deliberate gait, murmuring the admonition to herself.

During the terribly dry weather in the beginning of May we had a great fire on our moor; whether caused by incendiarism or not remains a moot point. The first hill that rolls up from our valley is now charred half-way. Viviane was much concerned.

“Poor moor burnt! Poor moor burnt!” she lamented. Then, with a delicious impulse qualified by characteristic caution, “Vivi kiss it where it is not black; kiss it and make it well!”

When her cousin and playmate’s father was tragically killed on the Yser, the little creature, who is devoted to her own father, was deeply concerned. The latter is heroically devoting himself to ambulance work at Calais. For many nights after the news of the young officer’s death was received, Viviane would anxiously inform everyone who came into her nursery that Papa was quite safe, pointing out his photograph on the chimney-piece at the same time.

“Vivi got her Papa quite safe,” in a confused association of ideas.

Though she has only seen him once for a very short time all these nine months, the child’s affectionate memory of him remains as distinct as ever, and returning the other day from a morning walk with a scratched knee, she declared pathetically she wished it had been a wound, for then Vivi’s father would have had to come and nurse her.

The spirit of the Belgian children is one of the most remarkable things of the war. As soon as they can understand anything at all they seem to grasp the situation of present valiant endurance and future glory. They know what sacrifices have been demanded of their parents. There is not a child that we have seen but measures the cost and its honour.

Upon the arrival of the Faire part of that same young officer above mentioned, with its immense black edge and unending list of sorrowing relatives, Viviane’s eldest brother, a boy of nine, asked to read it. When he came to the words: Mort pour la patrie, he looked up, his face illuminated.

“Oh, Maman, comme c’est beau!”

Not the least among the miscalculations of the Germans in Belgium has been their insane attempt to stifle the courage of the little country by ferocity. But Germany has never counted with souls, and it is by the power of the soul that this huge monster of materialism, with its gross brutality and gross reliance on masses and mechanism, will be overthrown. There is not a gamin of the Brussels streets that does not mock the German soldiery, finely conscious that, by the immortal defiance of the spirit, Prussian brutality itself is already vanquished. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!...

There was humour as well as heroism in the heart of the oppressed Antwerp Belgian on that afternoon of his King’s birthday, when he sent the three little girls to walk side by side through the streets dressed in black, orange, and red. The Hun stood helpless before the passage of the living flag, not daring to face the ridicule which would fall upon him all the world over were the babes arrested and taken to the Commandatur. It was a superb defiance, flung in the face of the despot, flung by the little ones! The whole history of Belgium’s glory and Germany’s shame is in it.

It is just the feeling that they are blessedly ignorant of the universal suffering that makes the company of our pets so soothing to us now.

“My dog is my one comfort,” cried a friend to us, surveying her Peky as he sat, fat and prosperous, his lip cocked with the familiar Chinese smile, triumphant after the feat of having silently bitten his mistress’s visitor. “He is the only person that hasn’t changed!”

The bite of a Pekinese does not hurt, it may be mentioned, and the visitor quite shared his owner’s feelings.

It may be something of the same sensation that makes the wounded soldiers in the hospital near us long for the forbidden joy of something alive for a mascot. They picked up a very newly hatched pheasant in the grounds the other day, and carried it home to share their bed and board. It was fed on extraordinary concoctions, and after three days was discovered to have passed away. There was a strong suspicion of the matron, who had not approved from the beginning. They consoled themselves by a military funeral. A very handsome coffin having been made by an expert, they went in solemn procession to lay the infant pheasant to rest. Now there is always a wreath on the grave.

Invited to the Villino this week to see our azaleas, they arrived, a batch of twenty, at the odd hour of ten o’clock in the morning, to be regaled with buns and lemonade, no tea-parties being allowed. They enjoyed themselves very much, but the feature of the entertainment was Mimosa, the small ruby Pekinese. She passed from embrace to embrace. She licked them so much that they told the Sister they would not need to have their faces washed any more. This is the kind of joke that is really appreciated in hospitals. When Mimi returned to her devoted Mrs. MacComfort in the kitchen, the latter remarked “she was so above herself she couldn’t do anything with her.”

Unfortunately all little dogs are not happy and protected like ours. Belgian friends who passed through villages and towns after the first wave of the invader had spread over the country tell us of a horrible and singular byway of wanton atrocity. The soldiery slaughter the dogs wholesale, some said to eat them, but that seems hardly credible. Most probably it was part of the scheme of general terrorism. To burn the houses and slay the husbands and fathers, to spear and mutilate and trample down the children, to insult the women, it was all not enough. The finishing touch must be given by the murder of the humble companion, the faithful watch-dog, the children’s pet. Piles and piles of dogs’ heads were at the corners of the streets, our friend told us.

We know they laid hold of the poor dogs to experiment upon them with their diabolical gas. But there was at least some reason in the latter brutality.

One hears many stories about the dogs of war.

At the beginning of the conflict the trained ambulance dogs were reported to have done splendid work in the French trenches. We do not know if we have any such, but we do know that the men have pets among them out there, whether mascots brought out from England or strays picked up from the abandoned farms. The deserted dogs! A French paper published an article upon these dumb victims, not the least pathetic of the many side tragedies of this year of anguish. It was a poor shop-keeper who described what he himself had seen in passing through a devastated town within the conquered territory.

“The dogs have remained in the town, from whence the inhabitants have fled. The dogs have remained where there is not left a stone upon a stone. How they do not die of hunger I cannot imagine. They must hunt for themselves far out in the country-side, I suppose, but they come back as quickly as they can and congregate at the entrance of the suburb on the highroad.

“There are two hundred, or three hundred perhaps—spaniels, sheep-dogs, fox-terriers, even small ridiculous lap-dogs—and they wait, all of them, with their heads turned in the same direction, with an air of intense melancholy and passionate interest. What are they waiting for? Oh, it is very easy to guess. Sometimes one of the old inhabitants of the town makes up his mind to come back from Holland. The longing to see his home, to know what is left of his house, to search the ruins, is stronger than all else—stronger than hatred, stronger than fear. And sometimes then one of the dogs recognizes him. His dog! If you could see it. If you could imagine it. All that troop of dogs who prick their ears at the first sight of a man coming along the road from Holland, a man who has no helmet, a man not in uniform; the instantaneous painful agitation of the animals who gaze and gaze with all their might—dogs have not very good eyes—and who sniff and sniff from afar, because their scent is better than their sight. And then the leap, the great leap of one of these dogs who has recognized his master, his wild race along the devastated road, ploughed with the furrows by the passage of cannons and heavy traction motors and dug with trenches; his joyous barks, his wagging tail, his flickering tongue! His whole body is one quiver of happiness. The dog will not leave that man any more, he is too much afraid of losing him. He will follow close to his heels without stopping to eat; one day, two days if needful; and in the end he goes away with him.

“But the others? They have remained on the road. And when they see this dog depart, having found at last what they all are seeking, they lift up their muzzles despairingly and howl, howl as if they would never stop, with great cries that fill the air, and re-echo until there is nothing more to be seen upon the road. Then they are dumb, but they do not move. They are there; they still hope.”