This is supposing that you are actually there.  If you are not, it amounts to the same thing.  Every dog knows that you meant to be there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone equally bad.  The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird, the ejaculation responsive to a flea—­any of these, anything to set the pack going.

And one pack starts the next.  And the cries of the two start the third and the fourth, and each of these reacts on the first.  The cry passes along the line, “We have him at last, the mad invader.”  There being no other enemy, they cry out against each other.  And of late years, since the barbed wire choked the cattle ranges, and gave pause to the coyote, there has been no enemy.  But the dogs are there, though their function has passed away.  It is but a tradition—­a remembrance.  Only to the dogs themselves does any reality exist.

Yet, such is the nature of dogs and men, the watchdog was never more numerous nor more alert than today.  He was never in better voice, and having nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection.  At least one justification remains.  Civilization has not done away with the moon.  In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined.  Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields.  The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is eager with vociferation.

Men say the Sleepless Watchdog’s bark is worse than his bite.  This may be, but it is certain that his feed is worse than both bark and bite together.  In the language of economics, the Sleepless Watchdog is an unremunerative investment.  He has “eaten his master out of house and home,” and by the same token, he imagines that he himself is now the master.

* * * * *

By this time, the gentle but astute reader has observed that this is no common “Dog Story,” but a parable of the times we live in; and that the real name of the Land of the Sleepless (but unremunerative) Watchdog is indeed Europe.

And because of the noisy and costly futility of the whole system in his own and other countries, Professor Ottfried Nippold of Frankfort-on-the-Main, has made a special study of the Watchdogs of Germany.

The good people of the Fatherland some forty years ago were drawn into a great struggle with their neighbors beyond the Rhine.  To divert his subjects’ attention from their ills at home, the Emperor of France wagered his Rhine provinces against those of Prussia, in the game of War.  The Emperor lost, and the King of Prussia took the stakes:  for in those days it was a divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.

The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable.  A fact accomplished cannot be blotted out.  But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge—­for honor, for War, War, War.  And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War.  The word sounds the same in all languages.  The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never begin.