12 
LAND & WATER 
July 12, 1917 
extra pay, which ot course is a crying shame ; watchkeepers 
do not like it either, but then they are never happy unless 
they, have a moan about something, so perhaps it works in- 
directly to give them pleasure. Nobody, in brief, is alto- 
gether sorry when it is all over. This is the sort of thin^you 
hear in the wardroom : 
"Well, is the battle over ? " 
" Yes, thank goodness. And if it had been a pukka show 
\vc sliould all be at the bottom of the sea by this time ! " 
" Wliy ■■' What went wrong ? " 
" What went wrong ? Did anything go right ? Well, well, 
there won't be another one till next time, that's one blessing ! " 
I fancy that a similar conversation may sometimes be heard 
in army messes. The pitiful incompetence of all officers 
senior to yourself in affairs 'of strategy is, of course, pro- 
verbial. Strangely enough, the opinions 'expressed' do riot 
preclude a very deep admiration for the Offic.erg coQcerned, 
nor do they in any way imply that the show has really bein 
a failure ; they are not intended to, but merely represent that 
tired feeling which supervenes on affairs which have been — 
to put it mildly — slightly lacking in personal interest. 
. Yet.P.Z.'s are the thing, after all. Not the Real Thing, 
but next door to it, and indispensable to a Fighting Navy, 
The Battle of Waterloo was won anywhere but on the playing 
fields of Eton ; it was won on a hundred drill-grounds and at 
innumerable deadly dull parades ; and the final battle for Sea 
Power, if ever it is fought, will be won not so much through 
the sports which help to keep the Navy fit and happy, but by 
countless P.Z. exercises in which admirals and captains have 
practised their hands at the great game. 
Liza! A True Story 
By H. Russell Wakefield 
SHE was the first to greet us. She came cautiously 
out, sniffed our stacked cycles, looked up into the 
C.O.'s face as he dismissed the company, and then 
trotted off with the men, walking delicately before 
them as if to show them round their new home. 
For the first few days she refused to be adopted, and 
accepted scraps of " Bully " with an aloof indiscrimination. 
Then one day she came into the bivouac of a man named 
Kowe, in my platoon, put her head between her paws and went 
to sleep. Why she chose him, I do not know, but I always 
felt something deeper than mere chance, some unswerving 
instinct sent her to him. If you looked at Rowe's crime sheet 
you would have put him down a rascal ; when you saw his 
face, you ever afterwards picked him out for the " sticky 
jobs " ; which is the highest praise one man can give 
another. He was dark as a gipsy, untamed, tireless, with 
a streak of irresponsibility which filled his crime sheet. 
That was the beginning of a great and simple friendship. 
Rowe's bivouac was pitched over an old disused trench, 
and the day after she adopted him, she hopped down into the 
trench as soon as it was light, placed an egg just by his head, 
and vJagged her tail as if to say, " You didn't expect that, did 
you ? " 
Rowe watched her after that. Just opposite tHe 
trench was a barn, where the sens lived. It was always 
slmt at night, but there was just one hole left for them to 
go in and out by. She discovered this, squeezed her way in 
and stole an egg so quietly that she hardly disturbed its in- 
dignant owner: She did this every morning for a fortnight, 
much to Rowe's satisfaction, until something went wrong. 
W hen off duty the men used to sit round the courtyard 
of the farm drinking beer and coffee and talking to the 
farmer's daughters in their marvellous esperanto. Rowe 
was sitting there one morning, when suddenly she came in, 
caught sight of her master, came up wagging her tail and 
put down an egg by his feet. When the farmer's daughter 
saw that, esperanto gave place to fluent, idiomatic Gallic 
abuse, and Liza, as she was beginning to be called, was only 
saved from the direst- penalties by a look in Rowe's eyes, 
which daunted even those viragoes. 
Now I must describe her. She was a combination of count- 
less breeds ; in stature and shape like a medium sized Irish 
terrier, a glossy red-brown in colour, with the most perfectly 
shaped head, and the most liquid, inteUigent, yet aloof eyes. 
\\ hen she looked at Rowe their expression was quite different. 
They glowed then with almost a tigerish affection. 
Liza grew a good deal while with the company, thickened 
out into a big, powerful dog, and lost a little of her original 
grace. W'hen she first joined us, she had a most sexless, 
virginal air about her. I always thought she suggested 
Artemis more than any real woman I have ever seen or read 
of. She possessed great speed and was never known to tire, 
and she had no nerves. We were mnning a bomb school 
at the time, and lived among the crash of live bombs and the 
hum of flying bits of metal. She never minded it in the least. 
One day, when Rowe came into his bivouac and found a 
large piece of bomb had gone clean through his blankets, she 
was sleeping peacefully just beside them. 
Liza came with us on all rides and marches. With her long 
easy stride, she easily kept up with the bicycles and found time 
to drive off all the stray horde of dogs, who were longing to get 
two good meals a day and a nice quiet home by the simple de- 
signing process of adoption. She went into the trenches for three 
weeks and killed innumerable rats. Rowe's friends she accepted 
as her own, but no, one else seemed to interest her in the least. 
Orders several times came round that all dogs were to be 
destroyed, but on the pica of her genius for destroying rats, 
I always managed to save her, and so earned Rowe's undying 
gratitude. Directly there was any trouble about her, he 
always came straight to me. 
Then in the late autumn we got orders to move back from 
the line, our destination Salonika. Liza, of course, came 
too. On the way down to Marseilles, the train stopped for 
half an hour at a wayside station, near Avignon. Lizagot 
out to stretch her legs, got on the track of a rabbit and went 
away after it. W hen the train began to move everybody began 
jumping in, and then Rowe, who had been making tea, 
missed her. 
"Where's Liza?" he shouted, "anyone seen Liza?" He 
was almost frantic. He gave the long shrill whistle which 
was always his signal for her. She was far out in a field at 
the time, but the moment she heard it, she put down her head, 
stretched out her beautiful legs and raced for the train. She 
came through a gap in the hedge, just level with the l^ist coach. 
She just managed to keep up with the train, which was 
very slowly increasing speed. Every man in the train was 
leaning out whistling and cheering her on. Rowe was onlv 
kept in the carriage by main force ; he was alternately whistling 
and cursing. For fully five minutes she kept it up, then seeing 
it was hopeless, stopped suddenly, stared after the train for 
a moment, then turned and slunk towards the station. 
My platoon thc«>. b^gan a long and heated wrangle as to 
whose fault it had been, while Rowe stood and stared back 
along the line. He hardly spoke until we got to Marseilles, 
and then got hopelessly and remorselessly drunk. The CO, 
understood, saved him from a court martial and let him off 
lightly. . A fortnight later we landed at Salonika. 
■When we had been there a month I was taking my platoon to 
the baths, and we were just turning up opposite the *W hite 
Tower, when I noticed a party of infantry coming towards us, 
I saw they had a dog with them, and I was just reahsing that 
it seemed strangely familiar, when I heard Rowe almost 
shout, " My God, there's Liza." I knew it was no moment 
for strict discipline, so I halted my party and told Rowe he 
could give one whistle, if he liked, 
When Liza heard it, she stood stock still, stared in our 
direction, then leapt towards us. Thai; meeting I will not 
attempt tq describe. 
We found out' that 'she had joined the next train passing 
through, had been adopted by a corporal and had come all 
the way with him. He was sorry to lose her, but, as he owned : 
" She never really took to me hke." For several days Liza 
ran wildly about, was petted by everyone and seemed to like 
it, and then settled down to her old aloof concentration on 
Rowe. 
Later on she fulfilled her destiny and became the mother 
of four robust but most mongrel puppies. She looked after 
them well, kept the flies oft" them, and pulled them in out of 
the sun into the excellent kennel Rowe had made for her. 
I am not sure, however, that she had a very strongly developed 
maternal instinct ; the heat was frightful, and altogether 
I think she was reheved, when they grew too large and in- 
dependent to need her care, and went off to join the great 
horde of stray mongrels, which glean a precarious livelihood 
in the streets of Salonika. , 
Liza came up the line with us, killed a snake in Rowe's 
bivouac and stood; the climate better than any of us. But 
she put on weight and was beginning to look more placid and 
mature,. When I last saw her she was sitting with my platoon, 
who were out qn post. . She was staring out over the lake, and 
growling peacefully when Rowe gently pulled her. tail. 
♦tXlife ^Villto Tijwer at Salonika is to bo seen to the left of tlie photo- 
graph *hi'.;h is published on ]iagc IS. 
