This is not an eccentricity. Around 1900 Belgium had a hundred and fifty thousand draught dogs hauling bakers' and dairy carts through its towns — dog-carting was ordinary Belgian life, and it was a Low Countries habit that no other army could have copied. So when Lieutenants Van de Putte and Blancgarin proposed mounting a Maxim on one, they were adapting something the country already had. A good draught dog cost forty to fifty francs; a packhorse cost several times that. The dogs were Belgian Mastiffs, strong enough for a sixty-pound gun, low to the ground and trained to acoustic signals. Each battalion kept thirty-six of them. At Halen on 12 August 1914 the dog-cart guns stopped the German cavalry.

Tradition gives you the whole team: the gun cart with its Maxim, a limber behind carrying the ammunition, the dogs in harness, and two Carabiniers walking after them with switches. The men wear the dark green and the yellow field cap of the 1st Carabiniers. In a diorama it hauls the gun up to the machine gun set on the flank. And for a sense of what Belgium had quietly sidestepped, look at the British lancer feeding his horse — Britain shipped more fodder to France than ammunition.

Tradition of London model 838. 54mm, white metal, hand-painted in gloss enamel. Four-piece set — dog cart with Maxim machine gun, ammunition limber, and two Carabinier followers, 1914. Supplied in the Tradition Classic Red Box. Allow 2–3 weeks delivery.