Sergeant Stubby

by Ann Bausum

  The 102nd did not linger long at the Atlantic coastal city of St. Nazaire. Instead, doughboys proceeded almost immediately from the city’s port to its rail yard where, once the shock had worn off, the men climbed into the 40 & 8s. In Conroy and Stubby’s case, their car became a 40 & 1s, as in 40 hommes et 1 chien. The regiment’s officers, per the local custom, rode in accompanying passenger cars. For the next few days, Conroy, Stubby, and their comrades remained confined to boxcars, except for brief breaks, while their train lumbered across northern France toward the war zone.

  At some point soon after reaching Europe, the powers that be found out about Stubby. The story goes that, before Conroy or his furry friend could be reprimanded or punished, Stubby, by then a well-trained observer of military protocol, had sat back on his haunches, reared up from the ground, raised his right paw, and given the critical officer a doggy salute. That did it. Stubby was pronounced an official mascot for his unit, and he and Conroy were allowed to proceed without rebuke.

  Conroy and his fellow doughboys did not begin fighting immediately, however. Plans called for American forces to gain seasoning at French training camps before assuming combat assignments. Artillery units headed to Brittany for instruction on firing the French artillery guns that were in use at the front. These outfits found themselves stationed southwest of Rennes at a French military camp called Coëtquidan. (The men authored a playful transliteration of the site’s hard-to-decode spelling as “Quit your kidd’n.”) Meanwhile, the 102nd and other infantry units from the Yankee Division headed toward Neufchâteau, a city in eastern France that is located southwest of Toul and Nancy.

  General Edwards set up his command post in the city itself, and YD men were parceled out to prearranged shelters, scattered throughout the community and its neighboring towns. Officers might earn actual rooms in civilian homes or hotels; the rank and file were not so lucky. Some were quartered in French-made barracks. Others bunked in barns, sheds, attics, storehouses, and stables. Accommodations ranged from simple to primitive, and almost all of them were unheated, at least in any meaningful way.

  French children came out to watch and wave in the spring of 1918 when the 101st Ammunition Train of the Yankee Division passed through the town of Soulosse on its way to the front.

  Where Conroy lived during this transition went unrecorded, but it seems safe to assume that whatever his circumstances, he felt a bit more at home because Stubby was nearby. The two of them, like everyone else, would have made the best of an Army that was still figuring out how to feed and shelter so many soldiers. When the supply system worked, the men obtained food from nearby Army storehouses, and, in those early days, they were often left to cook for themselves. When the system faltered, soldiers scrambled to fill in supply gaps on their own and scrounge for fuel. Some men became desperate enough to trade articles of clothing in exchange for cash or food, a swap that might have seemed good in the short run but created new problems later on when temperatures began to fall.

  With General Edwards established in Neufchâteau, the Yankee Division’s four infantry regiments set up their own command posts in proximity to their own troops, placing Conroy and Stubby at the hub of a growing network of interaction between the fighting units. Previously the infantry regiments had been scattered in camps throughout New England. By late October 1917, the YD infantrymen had all reached France, and they could begin to train together. Many only now had the opportunity to meet their division leader. General Edwards won the men’s loyalty by respecting the local ties that bound their individual companies and battalions together. “Is all the family here tonight?” he reportedly liked to ask his men when making nighttime rounds through encamped troops.

  Although some Yankee Division officers were career Army staffers, many of the men who guided YD companies and regiments were citizen-soldiers. Stateside they had been lawyers, doctors, and politicians. One had worked in insurance, another in the auto business, a third as a judge. Their leadership service in the National Guard had made them officers when they enlisted in the U.S. Army, even though they had not earned their military standing at West Point. The men under their command had looked up to their leaders at home, and they trusted them in the field. Edwards understood this. He knew such loyalty would be invaluable once the troops reached the front lines. The challenge was to sustain that Yankee spirit while preparing the men for the realities of trench warfare.

  The Yankee Division embarked on a demanding, three-stage training program devised by General Pershing and his staff for arriving troops. Each phase involved greater and greater integration of the fighting forces until, by the end, it was imagined that an entire 28,000-man division would be practicing war games in open terrain. This training introduced the doughboys to instructors who represented their counterparts from England (generically nicknamed Tommy, or the Tommies) and France (called the Poilu, a cultural term of endearment that translates literally as “the hairy one”). Together they prepared to face their adversaries, especially the Germans, who were tagged with such pejoratives as Fritz, Huns, and the Boche.

  Phase one of their European training looked to the Yankee soldiers an awful lot like what they had left behind in New England: marching and drilling without proper weaponry. Eventually, though, rifles arrived, along with grenades and machine guns, artillery pieces and shells. Adjusting to the resulting sights and sounds was probably a challenge for men and mascot alike. Nonetheless, the soldiers welcomed the chance to train with weapons at last. They worked on marksmanship, practiced the teamwork of firing heavy weaponry, and learned how to lob grenades. (British instructors promoted an underhanded cricket-style pitch that confounded the Americans; U.S. soldiers turned to their familiar sport of baseball for inspiration instead.) They labored six days a week for six hours a day, not counting routine military assignments such as guard duty or inspections.

  Robert Conroy kept no known journal about his wartime service, and no letters home have passed down through the family, but news accounts after the war and general knowledge about the workings of the Army offer a broad idea of how he—and Stubby—served in France. As one reporter put it, “Stubby’s history overseas is the story of almost any average doughboy.” Conroy and his four-footed friend certainly traveled, slept, and ate like the rest of the infantrymen, and Conroy undoubtedly received training in trench warfare. Conroy, too, took his turns with guard duty; when he did, Stubby stood watch beside him.

  Conroy’s assignment to the regimental headquarters company, though, gave him a wider range of responsibilities than most men, and it offered him greater freedom of movement. One of his regular duties during the winter of 1917–18 was as a dispatch rider. Conroy, astride a horse, with Stubby trotting alongside, delivered messages between the regimental command post and General Edwards’s headquarters at Neufchâteau, or to outlying units of the 102nd and their local trainers. This mobility allowed them to visit notable landmarks in the area, too, including Domrémy, the birthplace of French heroine Jeanne d’Arc. Local affection for Stubby prompted someone to give the dog a souvenir medal that honored the famed martyr, and it became Conroy’s first treasured memento of his time with Stubby in France.

  Frank P. Sibley, a reporter for the Boston Globe who spent the war embedded with the YD, published an early history of their experiences upon returning home. In With the Yankee Division in France, he describes one of the increasingly complex exercises that the soldiers practiced while stationed near Neufchâteau. After soldiers had dug a sample network of trenches, battalions took turns practicing offensive and defensive maneuvers around them. In place of artillery fire, Army buglers sounded long single notes of call. The musicians stood at fixed positions across the width of a battlefield and played their notes in concert with the advancing troops. Buglers stood silent until the troops aligned with them, and then fell silent again after they passed. This tandem work represented the artillery technique of a rolling barrage, where gun crews advanced in the wakes of infantrymen, firing cover shells t
oward enemy lines over the moving ranks of foot soldiers.

  As Conroy explored the French countryside with Stubby and other service members, the men observed similarities and differences between it and home. Some recognized a familiar roll to the hills or traversed fields that could have stood in their home counties. Yet they encountered civilians dressed in unfamiliar styles of clothing who spoke a foreign language and lived with different customs, including the routine storage of barnyard manure adjacent to their residences. (Doughboys living near such dwellings industriously hauled the waste away, only to watch the piles accumulate again.)

  One thing wholly new to the Americans, though, was French mud. “Real mud.” “The worst sort of mud that I have ever become acquainted with.” “Slippery yellow clay which hangs to your shoes and more and more keeps collecting.” The mind-boggling French mud became a constant additional challenge for the soldiers, and they mailed countless descriptions of it to the folks back home. Military censors prohibited the inclusion of any identifying details of place or mission, so such epistles were simply attributed to having been sent from “somewhere in France.”

  The French weather offered doughboys plenty of options for complaint, and even locals judged the 1917–18 season as unusually severe. First came incessant fall rains: Hence the mud. Boots and clothing became caked in muck, and surely mud clung to Stubby’s feet and fur, too. Eventually temperatures dropped to the point where the ground froze—a definite bright spot in terms of controlling the mud. But the cold temperatures persisted and were ever present in the men’s lives, whether indoors or out, given the makeshift nature of their quarters and their lack of fuel. Now, instead of training in rain, the soldiers performed their maneuvers in wet snow, sleet, icy winds, even blizzards. Leather boots stayed perpetually wet and began to rot. Foot ailments became a serious concern, and few gifts from home were more welcomed than a pair of hand-knitted woolen socks.

  As miserable as the men were, they still had music. The regimental marching bands that Stubby first heard in the States provided an ever present soundtrack to the scene in France, and songs from home ran through the soldiers’ heads and poured out of their lips. It was an era when singing was a national pastime; even Conroy could contribute a decent baritone to a tune. Elsie Janis and other popular entertainers of the day toured France to amuse the troops. Official units of American soldiers were tasked with creating their own touring theatrical and musical reviews, too, and reportedly went on to perform even when shell fire threatened to disrupt their acts.

  Naturally, when the nation went to war, its composers did, too—at least musically. George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and countless others penned lyrics and melodies that kept time moving on both sides of the Atlantic. Just the titles of the songs capture the spirit of the effort: “When Yankee Doodle Learns to ‘Parlez-vous Française.’ ” “America, Here’s My Boy.” “If the Kaiser Were Wiser He’d Keep Far Away.” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight (For Her Daddy Over There).” “Good-bye Broadway, Hello France.”

  Members of the 101st Infantry Regiment and other Yankee Division doughboys piled into 40 & 8 boxcars when they departed Neufchâteau in February 1918, heading for the trenches.

  Irving Berlin penned a silly song for sailors called “Over the Sea, Boys.” His refrain of “Yo-Ho! Yo-Ho!” riffs through stanzas that end with such playful couplets as “We’ll fill our guns with Navy beans / And shoot the German submarines,” and “We have to leave our wives behind / For fighting of a different kind.”

  Newspaper headlines of America’s entry into the war had inspired George M. Cohan to write “Over There,” a bouncy march that became a runaway national hit:

  Over there over there

  Send the word, send the word over there

  That the Yanks are coming the Yanks are coming

  The drums rum-tum-tumming everywhere …

  When Elsie Janis toured France to entertain the troops, she crafted an adaptation of Cohan’s song, calling it “Over Here.” She taught it to the men and together they would sing such lines as, “Mother dear, dry that tear / Soon your worries will all disappear,” because, as her song went, the American troops would secure a victory.

  In early February 1918, the Yankee Division received orders to move closer to the front for its next phase of training. Conroy and Stubby were once again on the move. As the soldiers climbed into transport trucks and 40 & 8 boxcars, groups of men broke into song. Perhaps Conroy joined in. Maybe some of them, too, sang some of Cohan’s original lyrics: “The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,” the men may have bellowed, ending with the roaring pledge “And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN AND OUT OF THE TRENCHES

  DURING 1917, WHILE AMERICANS PREPARED FOR THEIR country to enter the Great War, Russian citizens wanted to drop out of the conflict. As Conroy enlisted in the National Guard, while Stubby wandered into Camp Yale, and as General Pershing plotted military strategy with his Allied counterparts, a pair of revolutions swept across Russia. Supply shortages and mounting casualties in the fight with Germany contributed to the unrest that ended the reign of Czar Nicholas II and ushered in the rise of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin had no interest in sustained combat with Germany, and by March 1918 the two nations had signed a peace treaty. This development provided German military commanders with their hoped-for windfall. With the guns now silent on its eastern front, they could transfer newly idle German troops—some one million men—to fight against the Allies on its western front.

  Many of these soldiers received extra training and equipment as part of their redeployment. They practiced a new way of fighting, one designed to break through the entrenched battle lines across Belgium and France. Armed with machine guns and flamethrowers, among other weapons, they were assigned to infiltrate weak points in the Allied defenses. Next, these elite fighters would press deep into enemy territory and expose the remaining fortifications to attack from the conventional infantrymen who followed behind them. Military leaders called these soldiers Stosstruppen—storm troopers. The one-two punch delivered by these paired forces was designed to create chaos, panic, and defeat. The Germans planned to begin deploying the troops in the spring of 1918.

  Conroy’s Yankee Division and other American outfits raced to get ready for the anticipated spring offensive. Moving all the men and matériel toward the front lines represented a logistical challenge that was met with a mix of ingenuity and hard work. Keeping the fighting forces supplied became as crucial to the war’s outcome as the performance of the fighters themselves. Gun crews practiced loading and unloading ammunition trains stocked with artillery pieces and shells. An effort that might have taken more than two hours on the first attempt shrank to as little as 15 minutes after months of practice in advance and at the front.

  The Army’s Quartermaster Corps perfected the procurement and distribution of food, the repair and replacement of clothing, and the transport of other supplies in an unfamiliar country where its residents spoke an unknown language. This corps managed warehouses full of stores near railway hubs, and they coordinated the distribution of goods to the places where they were needed. That work required the shipment of countless vehicle tires, boxcars full of animal forage, and train cars loaded with ammunition shells, among other items. Such movements were not without dangers, even at some distance from the front lines. In the dawning era of aerial combat, one never knew when enemy planes might conduct a scouting mission or hostile raid, so the trains included machine guns and gunners tasked with defending cargo.

  Although the Yankee Division infantrymen shipped out from Neufchâteau via train and truck, they completed their journeys on foot (probably someone’s idea of how to give the men further conditioning). Conroy would have joined his fellow soldiers in the trek, and Stubby appears to have kept up without complaint. Each soldier bore responsibility for carrying his own gear. Stubby caught a pass on that duty, however; his two-legged friend
s carried everything from spare clothing to toiletries, from weaponry to ammunition, from food rations to eating utensils and dishes. It didn’t take long before the men learned to travel light. Items of sentimental value and personal comfort had to be very dear indeed to merit the effort it took to haul them on long marches. Machine-gunners often found themselves toting not only their personal gear but some or all of a machine gun (with each weapon weighing in at more than 100 pounds, including the tripod).

  Early in 1918, the 102nd Regiment gained a new commander, Col. John H. Parker. This career officer and veteran of the Spanish-American War had earned the nicknames “Gatling Gun” Parker and “Machine Gun” Parker because of his acknowledged expertise in the usage of rapid-firing weapons. The men liked their new commander from the start. The assignment of a new leader to the regiment meant that Stubby had to charm a new commanding officer, which he apparently promptly did. It was later reported that “Stubby was the only member of Parker’s regiment that could talk back to him and get away with it.” Parker saw no reason to question the animal’s role as the 102nd’s mascot, and he gave Conroy permission to advance with him toward the combat zone. They reached their new posting on February 5.

  The men and their mascot found themselves at battle positions along a relatively quiet stretch of the western front named after the Chemin des Dames, a notable highway that traversed part of the territory. For the first time, the entire Yankee Division—artillery included—was stationed together; thus united, the division would participate in phase two of its training. Its various regiments and batteries were assigned to spend a month shadowing and serving alongside their compatriots from XI Corps of the French Army. The division’s American commanders collaborated with their French counterparts in the maneuvers and retained overall responsibility for their own men.