The Regimental Dog Is Buried By The Gate And He Still Does The Rounds

There is a small stone by the gate with a dog's name on it and a date in the 1950s. The regiment buried him there and somebody, at some point, planted a rose, and the rose is still going, which nobody can explain either.

The thing happens at 02:00, on the hour, near enough.

Claws on concrete. Trotting. Not running — the unhurried, businesslike pace of a working dog doing a route it knows.

It always goes away from you. That is the detail that everybody who has stood that gate will tell you, and they will tell you in the same words, and I have heard those same words from a man of eighty who did his service in 1968 and from a girl of nineteen who did hers last year.

It never comes toward you.

I stood that gate for two years. I heard it maybe thirty times. The first time I nearly had a heart attack and I have never admitted that to anyone in uniform.

By the end I would say, "Evening," out loud, in the dark, to a sound.

Here is the story I actually want to tell you, though.

A lad called Marek came to us from another unit, and he had a rescue dog — a real one, a live one, a lurcher with a stupid face — and he lived out and sometimes he would bring her, and everybody loved her.

One night he was on the gate and the lurcher was with him, lying down, asleep.

At two o'clock, she woke up.

She did not bark. She did not growl. She stood up, and she looked down the road, and she wagged her tail — once, twice — and then she lay back down and went to sleep.

Marek did not say anything about it, and neither did I, for about six months, until we were both drunk in a pub in another town.

He said, "She wagged."

I said, "I know."

We did not say anything else. We had another drink.

I still think about it every time I hear a dog's claws on a hard floor. Sixty years of soldiers, and not one of us has ever seen him, and one lurcher who did not need to.