10
was fully ten yards away. Somehow he must reach it and look out. The idea became an obsession
with him, and soon he could
think of nothing except the window. But what about his leg? He put his hand underneath the
bedclothes and felt the thick
bandaged stump which was all that was left on the right-hand side. It seemed all right. It didn’t
hurt. But it would not be easy.
He sat up. Then he pushed the bedclothes aside and put his left leg on the floor. Slowly,
carefully, he swung his body over until
he had both hands on the floor as well; and then he was out of bed, kneeling on the carpet. He
looked at the stump. It was very
short and thick, covered with bandages. It was beginning to hurt and he could feel it throbbing.
He wanted to collapse, lie down
on the carpet and do nothing, but he knew that he must go on.
With two arms and one leg, he crawled over towards the window. He would reach forward as far
as he could with his arms,
then he would give a little jump and slide his left leg along after them. Each time he did, it jarred
his wound so that he gave a soft
grunt of pain, but he continued to crawl across the floor on two hands and one knee. When he got
to the window he reached
up, and one at a time he placed both hands on the sill. Slowly he raised himself up until he was
standing on his left leg. Then
quickly he pushed aside the curtains and looked out.
He saw a small house with a gray tiled roof standing alone beside a narrow lane, and
immediately behind it there was a plowed
field. In front of the house there was an untidy gar- den, and there was a green hedge separating
the garden from the lane. He
was looking at the hedge when he saw the sign. It was just a piece of board nailed to the top of a
short pole, and because the
hedge had not been trimmed for a long time, the branches had grown out around the sign so that
it seemed almost as though it
had been placed in the middle of the hedge. There was something written on the board with
white paint, and he pressed his
head against the glass of the window, trying to read what it said. The first letter was a G, he
could see that. The second was an
A, and the third was an R. One after another he man- aged to see what the letters were. There
were three words, and slowly
he spelled the letters out aloud to himself as he managed to read them. G-A-R-D-E A-U C-H-IE-
N. Garde au chien. That is
what it said.
He stood there balancing on one leg and holding tightly to the edges of the window sill with his
hands, staring at the sign and at
BEWARE OF THE DOG
11
the whitewashed lettering of the words. For a moment he could think of nothing at all. He stood
there looking at the sign,
repeating the words over and over to himself, and then slowly he began to realize the full
meaning of the thing. He looked up at
the cottage and at the plowed field. He looked at the small orchard on the left of the cottage and
he looked at the green
countryside beyond. “So this is France,” he said. “I am France.”
Now the throbbing in his right thigh was very great. It felt as though someone was pounding the
end of his stump with a
hammer, and suddenly the pain became so intense that it affected his head and for a moment he
thought he was going to fall.
Quickly he knelt down again, crawled back to the bed and hoisted himself in. He pulled the
bedclothes over himself and lay
back on the pillow, exhausted. He could still think of nothing at all except the small sign by the
hedge, and the plowed field and
the orchard. It was the words on the sign that he could not forget.