Free Homing by Elswyth Thane

animal A.R.P. had welcomed her, and she had committed herself for training and brought back their leaflets.
    There were plans for animal ambulances, she had learned, which in most cases would consist of private cars dedicated to the task. There were to be shelters for pets, underground or properly braced, with two exits, and intelligent humans in attendance; separate pens for each dog and cat, space for separate birdcages, an identity tag for each inmate, registered and numbered so that it could always be traced…. Midge already had his luggage tag for travelling, with her address on it. Everybody must have a tag like Midge’s now…. There wasn’t to be any charge, because it was the people who couldn’t afford to pay who would need it most. There had to be free food—I could buy a stock of food, Sylvia thought, and they wouldn’t have to bring it with them—often there mightn’t be time—and there will be strays, the woman said. Even without tags, the strays must be fed. There was still so much to do before it started, before rationing began, and they needed contributions terribly, and fortunately she had some money of her own….
    But she wondered if it looked as though she was funking it, working with creatures who had no souls and couldn’t tell their trouble. Maybe it was funk, not to face the human fright and pain and blood. At least Mab seemed not to think less of her this afternoon, when she finally chose her war work and signed up as an Animal Guard, though it was often hard to tell what Mab thought behind that unchildlike composure. Apparently Mab had more courage than Jeff’s wife, who found herself sick and shaky with what must be sheer cowardice when everyone else was so collected and sure where their duty lay. Even Mab was brave, thought Sylvia—and it was humiliating to remember, unfairly, that Mab would be sent to Farthingale before it began….
    When Dinah set out for the BBC to hear Jeff’s broadcast, Mab and Virginia decided to try bed, but Sylvia was still mooching about in the drawing room, where Midge’s cage stood covered in a corner, when they all returned after midnight. Bracken saidhe had given up sleeping for the duration, and they sat a while with drinks and sandwiches, discussing the telephone conversation which he had had with Johnny before the broadcast began. The Taverne, where the correspondents gathered in Berlin, was reduced to its neutral customers now, after having drunk the Russian Pact in with champagne the night before as a gesture of defiance and to relieve their feelings; neutrals and the smirking German editors who were now suddenly denying everything they had been taught by the Nazis to say about Russia for six years, in a brazen overnight about-face fantastic even for the mindless hirelings of Goebbels. By dawn some of the Taverne arguments had turned pretty nasty, and some of the less neutral, like Johnny, had had to take a turn in the Tiergarten to cool off. He would never forget Camilla’s face when he got home, Johnny said, roused out of a belated sleep to hear his latest news. “Sitting up in bed jawing me !” he reported with something like a snicker. “I had to remind her that I hadn’t gone to Moscow!”
    They smiled rather feebly at the story, and their own dawn, twenty-four hours later, was greying the streets outside. Johnny thought the Berlin rumours last night of an immediate march into Poland were premature, because the German people hadn’t been sufficiently worked up to it. The Germans were awfully happy so far about the whole thing at Moscow, Johnny said—too happy even to feel sheepish, for the terms of the Pact precluded a Soviet alliance with Britain and France now, and banished the carefully nurtured German nightmare of encirclement . Now there could be no Eastern Front—except of course Poland, which didn’t count.
    Johnny said the bar at the Adlon where he and Camilla lived was very lonely tonight with the British gone. He had been