he fence. He dashed out and
died. His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body.
I understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by
the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to be distinctly
unsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary, it seemed unhealthily
obese; its skin showed bare patches of an unpleasant character. However,
they had not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. He was large.
. . . He was eaten. . . . The rest is silence. . . .

A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:

"I could not have eaten that dog."

And his grandmother remarks with a smile:

"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."

I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to
eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language
of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on
ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake,
of nondescript dishes containing things without a name--but of the
Lithuanian village dog--never! I wish it to be distinctly understood
that it is not I, but my granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed
gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, etc., who in his young days,
had eaten the Lithuanian dog.

I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly
to the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still, if
he really had to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on
active service, while bearing up bravely against the greatest military
disaster of modern history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his
country. He had eaten him to appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for
the sake of an unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great
faith that lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled
like a false beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a brave
nation.

_Pro patria!_

Looked at in that light, it appears a sweet and decorous meal.

And looked at in the same light, my own diet of la vache enragee appears
a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I,
the son of a land which such men as these have turned up with their
plowshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of
fantastic meals of salt junk and hardtack upon the wide seas? On
the kindest view it seems an unanswerable question