Bonzo's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

of a diversion by asking whether she could be supplied a gas mask for bees. The enquirer was animated by genuine concern.’
    Cat World
magazine reported on 1 October: ‘We have had numerous letters and telephone calls from anxious readers asking for information regarding the safety of theircats should this country be subject to air raids and poison gas attacks. The RSPCA suggests sending your pets away to friends, finding refuge in a gas-proof room, but it is not possible to obtain gas masks for cats.’
    The Cats Protection League was no less anxious. As its journal,
The Cat
, had reported earlier in the summer: ‘One of our members asks what are the air raid precautions we suggest for cats and adds: “I should hate to have them killed unnecessarily”.’
    Just so. The League had asked the Whitehall authorities what plans were being made for felines and evidently did not get much of a reply.
The Cat’s
editor reported: ‘Until we know for certain what would be the special arrangements we must NOT depend on being able to take our cats to Public Air Raid Shelters. One of the cold facts is that human beings will be considered first.’
    And the humane and kindly columnist for
The Cat
, Mr Albert Steward, was right, of course. He could also report meanwhile that there was no practical way to protect cats from gas attack. ‘Those of us who have seen the sufferings of homeless cats on the continent would not hesitate to make the decision that would make their cats safe from the horrors of war,’ he wrote. ‘Kill them’ was what he meant.
    What on earth to do? Many pet lovers decided to say goodbye. As the National Canine Defence League reported at the end of that dismal year: ‘One feature of the crisis which should be placed on record is that many dogs were brought to the NCDL clinics to be put to sleep. Our clinic superintendents declined to destroy these healthy animals, advising the owners to wait and see. Dozens of dogs were thus reprieved, and are still enjoying life to-day.’
    Six weeks after Munich came a brutal new twist. The ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom in German and Austrian cities set a new flood of Jewish refugees to flight. Some of them hadpets. Frau Weingarten of Vienna had her cats’ quarantine fees paid by the Cats Protection League after a national newspaper appeal. Our Dumb Friends’ League also knew what to do. ‘The League felt that this country, which prides itself on its love for animals, could not lower its prestige in the eyes of so many foreigners by deliberately killing their pets,’ it reported. ‘Not only was it a national, but an international duty to save them.’ And so, with much anti-foreigner grumbling from the sidelines, their quarantine kennels were opened to asylum-seeking dogs.
    The Dogs Bulletin
reported: ‘As one penniless refugee from Vienna said to the NCDL, as her St Bernard dog was accommodated gratis, “I shall always be indebted to you”.’ But there were more warnings that refugee dogs, and those left behind by evacuees, might fall prey to vivisectors.
    Pets faced danger everywhere.

Chapter 2
It Really is Kindest …
    The ‘Peace in Our Time’ jubilation after Munich did not last long for the last Republican strongholds in Spain, Barcelona, then Madrid, were on the brink of falling. The plight of refugees trudging with their animals across the Pyrenees from Catalonia into France in February 1939 excited the RSPCA enough for them to send the veteran colonial vet, Colonel Robert John Stordy, to Perpignan on the border to see what could be done. He found the French Army had already ‘commandeered healthy horses and mules and arranged for the humane destruction’ of the rest. There was little more to do but come home.
    Colonel Stordy had already drafted a memorandum for fellow vets and the Scottish SPCA on ‘animals in a national emergency’. He had suggested