There was something written on the board with white paint. He pressed his head against the glass of the window, trying to read what it said. The first letter was a G, he could see that. The second was an A, and the third was an R. One after another he managed to see what the letters were. There were three words, and slowly he spelled the letters out aloud to himself as he managed to read them. GA-R-D-E A-U C-H-I-E-N, Garde au chien. That is what it said.
“Beware of the Dog” is really the only story in this collection that seems like a typical short story by Roald Dahl. He is a craftsman of short fiction famous for being a purveyor of the classic tradition of storytelling during a time when experimental fiction was threatening the most basic foundation of the form: the story part. Dahl’s most short stories—of which this is one—are constructed upon the now outmoded idea that something should actually happen. He tells narratives that rely upon what had become a dirty word by the time he published this story: plot. Ironically, however, it is one of the few—arguably the only—story in this collection in which plot takes precedence. Even the title of the story itself is chosen based on the climactic point of the story. The pilot looking out the window at the board with the French phrase which translates into “beware of dog” has been led to believe he is back in England after having crashed his plane during combat in World War II. This is the moment that confirms his worst suspicions.
“…you know I keep thinking during a raid, when we are running over the target, just as we are going to release our bombs, I keep thinking to myself, shall I just jink a little; shall I swerve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else. I keep thinking, whom shall I make them fall on; whom shall I kill tonight. Which ten, twenty or a hundred people shall I kill tonight. It is all up to me. And now I think about this every time I go out.”
Unlike “Beware of the Dog” this story features not plot at all and it is much more representative of the collection as a whole. It is similar to that story, however, in the fact that it—like all the other stories in the book—offer insight into the psychological state of mind of bomber pilots. “Beware of the Dog” uses an almost fantastical, yet still believable, plot on which to construct a thematic exploration of the ways that the daily effects of fighting battles in the skies far away from the screams of victims can tamper with the psyche whereas Dahl strips away all the façades of storytelling to pursue the same examination here. This is a story that also takes place after the war is over and features two ex-pilots sharing war stories.
But these are stories the glory of wartime heroism. From this point, the speaker moves to the next level as he considers the victims he might have killed just by making that slight movement in the trajectory of his flight pattern. He imagines dropping bombs not on his intended target, but perhaps a house filled with “lousy women-shooting German soldiers” or, alternatively, miss the soldiers and drop his bomb on an old man hiding in a bomb shelter. The conversation offers readers a chilling glimpse into the dark side of the typically heroic figure of the RAF pilot: he is a man who has been handed the powers of a god with the ability to choose, should he so desire, who gets to live another day and who will not see another sunrise.
But the woman who sat by the window never moved. She had been dead for some time.
Dahl’s short stories are famous for their twist endings, which often end abruptly upon a shocking imagery encapsulating a reversal of expectations. Some of the stories in this collection to reach a conclusion that may not be foreseen, but unlike much of the author’s work they do not seem to have been in reverse, starting from that point of ironic subversion and working backward. The most difficult way to write a story relying on an ironic twist is to create the setup first and then figure out the twist later. It is much easier to come up with twist and then figure out a story that leads to it. As a result, while this type of story is often quite entertaining, it can feel more “manufactured” than realistic.
The closing line of “Only This” is probably the closest that the collection comes to ending on one of those abrupt notes of imagery that Dahl specializes in, but it never for a moment feels manufactured. The dead woman by the window is the mother of an RAF pilot and in what is almost certainly the collection’s most unusual method for illuminating the psychology of the bomber pilot, Dahl violates the conventions of reality to situate mother and son together in their respective last moments on earth occurring in the same time, but nowhere near the same place.
