by Ann Bausum
Conroy, Stubby, and the other soldiers took up residence in an underground network of bunkers that had been fashioned out of former limestone quarries. Wooden planking covered the walls and floors of many of the subterranean tunnels and chambers. Soldiers slept in bunk beds covered with chicken wire and straw. Underground passageways connected the living and sleeping quarters. Some of the rooms lay 30 or more feet below ground, and they offered the men a refuge of comparative quiet and safety from the combat activities taking place outside.
Conroy’s duties expanded upon reaching the front lines when he was assigned to the intelligence unit of the regimental headquarters company, tasked with observing enemy troop movements. Among other reconnaissance, the work would have taken him—and, presumably, Stubby—through the bands of defensive trenches and their connecting communication links in search of eyewitness reports from the front lines. Conroy’s freedom of movement would have introduced Stubby to many of the regiment’s men, adding to the mascot’s profile within the corps.
Meanwhile, the regiment’s infantrymen rotated in and out of the lines of combat trenches, defending the front lines against periodic enemy raids. Most of the action, though, came from perpetual bombardments of artillery fire. The Americans became adept at recognizing the distinctive sounds and behaviors of enemy and Allied fire. Artillery guns of different calibers corresponded to the size of the shells that they fired. The various French field guns, which A.E.F. batteries used as well, discharged shells in a range of sizes, including 75 mm, 105 mm, and 155 mm. (Different batteries received different calibers of guns, so artillery units typically had personal experience with only some of this range of equipment.)
Allies also used giant battleship guns—known, too, as railway guns because they were transported on the ground using rail lines; the enormous weapons fired shells almost twice the size of the largest field artillery piece and had a range of many miles. These guns emitted a predictable giant booming sound when fired; the others made noises ranging from rapid-firing barks to deeper roars.
Armed forces relied on a primitive system of hastily strung telephone wires for much of their battlefront communication. This photo shows a soldier laying line for the 101st Field Signal Battalion of the Yankee Division during the fall of 1918.
German artillery came with its own telltale soundtrack. The German naval/railway gun fired 210 mm shells that delivered a powerful percussive as well as destructive force. Assorted German minenwerfers, nicknamed minnies, launched trench mortars of varying calibers, including one as large as 50 pounds. A trademark “plop” sounded with the launch of one of these shells, and soldiers scrambled to avoid its plodding trajectory. The 88-mm “whiz-bangs,” in contrast, traveled faster than the speed of sound. Allied troops had a saying that “you never hear the shell that’s going to get you,” and it is easy to imagine how one of these “whiz-bangs” could catch a man unawares. The men who survived the shell’s impact then had to endure the delayed arrival of its volley of sound.
Soldiers on both sides stacked artillery shells like cord wood and launched them by the hundreds. Guns might fall quiet for a time only to renew their dialogues in response to a probing volley from the opposite side. Just keeping these remote gun crews supplied with ammunition was one more logistical challenge for the war effort. Supply crews employed every possible means of conveyance to move shells to the front, including horse-drawn wagons and carts pulled by dogs. Such operations often took place at night to reduce the chance of being targeted by enemy fire, but that meant navigating a darkened landscape pockmarked with the impact craters from earlier rounds of shelling.
The warfront landscape appeared just as surreal in daylight. Tangles of barbed wire secured various defenses. Charred skeletons represented former trees. The land’s most productive crop became shallow graves with makeshift markers. Nearby villages stood in ruins, often abandoned by their residents. Add the lingering odors of exploded shells, the smell of excrement from horses and other livestock (not to mention humans), the ground tremors caused each time a large gun was fired, the percussive force of falling enemy shells, and one can begin to imagine the background scene that greeted the Yankee Division when it reached what was actually regarded as a quiet part of the western front.
How Stubby reacted to gunfire and artillery bombardments was later reported with a healthy dose of dramatic license. News accounts claim, variously, that Stubby “never once winced under fire” (per a 1925 article in the Washington Post); that he combined an “angry howl [with a] mad canter from one part of the lines to the other” (New York Times, from 1926); that “every artillery barrage left poor, forsaken Stubby quivering and shaking on all four legs” (Hartford Courant, 1919); or that, conversely (as reported in the Hartford Courant five days after its previous story), “in the tradition of the Yankee Division … he never yelped.” Truth be told, Stubby probably did all of the above and more as the war unfolded.
On March 17, 1918, the members of the YD experienced their first exposure to poisonous gas. By that point in the war the Germans had employed three different kinds of gas in combat: chlorine, phosgene, and the now infamous mustard gas. On the 17th, shells carrying one of these toxins fell on the soldiers for hours at a time. The men had trained for such a situation, and each soldier had his own gas mask for personal defense. Stubby had one, too, thanks to Conroy and a sympathetic Allied officer.
Initially Conroy had ordered a French-made doggy gas mask for his friend, but the device did not conform securely enough to the animal’s head. So a French lieutenant fashioned an alternative mask for the popular mascot using military supplies, and Conroy trained Stubby to put up with wearing it. With Conroy’s coaching, the dog learned to retreat to his dugout bunker during a gas bombardment.
Before long Stubby, using his canine-keen sense of smell (and probably his hearing, too), began to recognize an impending gas attack. Then he’d alert his comrades by barking an alarm and, when necessary, nipping at sleeping soldiers. Stubby’s alert then helped trigger the standard bells of warning for an attack and allowed everyone, himself included, to be more prepared when the gas shells began to fall.
On one occasion, the alert dog happened upon a soldier who was sleeping below ground in a dugout and had not heard the topside alarm. Stubby stirred him awake, saving him from serious injury since gas regularly settled in the underground network of tunnels and chambers. Later on, the grateful sergeant, John J. Curtin, composed a poem in tribute to Stubby: “Listen to me and I will tell / Of a dog who went all through hell,” Curtin began. His multistanza tribute included the couplet: “He always knew when to duck the shells / And buried his nose at the first gas smells.”
Conroy recorded a tantalizingly brief accounting of Stubby’s wartime experiences. He explained that, during combat duty, “Stubby was always on his own—he was never tied up anywhere—he seemed to know that no one could bother with him during action and that he had to stay quietly under cover if he expected to remain a live mascot.” At times, Stubby reportedly took advantage of his freedom of movement to go, as is said in the military, AWOL, or absent without leave. Most of these disappearances were brief, and, as reporters later joked, “he always came in clean and sober,” and he “never once spent time in the brig.”
On one occasion, though, the dog went missing for much longer than usual, and “the division mourned him as lost.” Then, by chance, a soldier from the YD’s 101st Infantry Regiment spotted a familiar-looking animal during an interaction with a French infantry unit. There was Stubby, being led on a leash by a French Poilu! The doughboy challenged his counterpart and demanded that he surrender Stubby so he could be returned to his original outfit. The man refused. The Yankee soldier grew more insistent and began to threaten the Frenchman with disciplinary action. With reluctance the Poilu relented, and the American, taking custody of the popular mascot, returned him to Conroy.
Stubby’s popularity came from his personality. He befriended his fellow doughboys by sharing time
with them. He kept men company while they stood watch. He snuggled alongside napping men. His relentless good humor lifted the spirits of soldiers anxiously waiting in front-line trenches, and he had a dog’s knack for knowing when someone needed the comfort of an uncomplaining companion. “He was not a ‘one man’ dog, but everyone’s friend,” explained a news reporter after the war. Stubby charmed one and all, from the Yankee Division’s commander on down, “but his intimate friends were the mud-bespattered doughboys in the front lines,” wrote the journalist.
Infantrymen rotated in and out of the front-line trenches, retreating when they weren’t on duty to the relative quiet and safety of the underground quarters located a short distance from their defensive lines. This split service created an odd blending of mundane downtime with life-or-death intensity. Soldiers began to adapt to the contrasts and filled their lulls with simple pleasures—playing poker, writing home, reading, drawing, and so on, not to mention hanging out with Stubby.
Plus the men had personal chores to do, from washing out socks to mending torn clothing to dealing with matters of individual hygiene. The latter quickly became a rather hopeless pursuit. Soldiers soon abandoned hope of having dependable access to showers, or even the chance to wash up. Who knew when they’d ever receive a set of fresh clothing? As a result, even though the men may have cursed the Kaiser and hurled insults at the Huns, they lived closer still to their number one personal enemy: lice.
The body lice, which the men routinely referred to as cooties, were omnipresent on the front. They thrived on human blood and luxuriated in the dirty, closely quartered environment of trench life. Stubby would have been untroubled by the lice because the parasite’s diet was restricted to people. For the mascot’s doughboy pals, though, living in the trenches and living with cooties became synonymous states of being.
The soldiers employed a variety of methods to combat the itchy, nipping bugs—from boiling their underclothing to methodically picking the lice off of garments (a pastime playfully nicknamed “reading” clothes)—but none of these techniques worked for long. “I sometimes wonder whether my shirt belongs to me or to them,” observed one YD soldier when writing home about the lice, “but we get used to them after a while.”
The U.S. Army added its weight to the fight with roving disinfecting squads that periodically met up with the men, particularly when the soldiers were being relieved from front-line service. In these instances, soldiers stripped bare and turned their clothes over for inspection. Those items in need of repair or replacement were set aside; usable clothing headed to the portable laundry machine. This device treated the garments with a cootie-unfriendly combination of pressurization and hot steam. Lice killed, the clean clothes were then hung to dry. Meanwhile the soldiers flocked to portable showers. Most of these facilities were primitive outdoor devices that simply relied on gravity to force water through a network of pipes and shower nozzles.
Army staff photographers dutifully documented the laundry and shower systems along with every other aspect of the war. One captioned album of these photos contains such cheerful comments as: “Note the happy appearance of these men as they are about to leave the plant,” and “They are going home as merry as small boys from a school picnic.” Instead of smelling as fresh as a daisy, though, clean soldiers smelled like creosote, having applied a smoky distillation of the chemical substance to their bodies. With luck, the aftershave-like solution would act as a temporary deterrent to reinfestation.
Stubby may have earned a pass on body lice, but humans and dogs alike battled perpetually with rats. Trench rats thrived in the dirty, crowded conditions at the warfront. They grew enormous—as large as house cats—as they scrounged fearlessly through the subterranean passageways and chambers at the front. Soldiers described seeing “green eyes about everywhere,” after extinguishing their lights. The men learned to sleep through the animals’ nighttime visits, even when the rodents ran over the top of their bodies.
The rats, like the lice, could spread diseases, so soldiers tried to fight this enemy, too. One strategy involved employing dogs with a natural penchant for killing rats. These so-called ratters offered some control of the varmints, but rats remained as omnipresent as lice throughout the war. Stubby’s terrier genes made him a good rat hunter, too, so he added rat patrol to his growing list of wartime duties. Did Stubby eat the rats he caught? Quite possibly. He may have hunted for other wild game, too. Most of all, though, he probably continued to rely on his military buddies for food.
It fell to the Army’s Quartermaster Corps to procure and distribute the provisions required to literally feed an army. Purchasers bought local beef by the side, potatoes by the cartload, and cabbages by the sackful. The French employed similar methods but included another staple in their soldiers’ diet—red wine—which they purchased in casks so large that two of them would fill a standard flatbed railcar. Quartermasters supplied the troops with crates of cigarettes and tobacco, too, selling these items to the men via traveling commissary stores. Alternatively, the men turned to social welfare outfits—such as the YMCA, Salvation Army, Jewish Welfare Board, and so on—for cigarettes, candy, cups of hot cocoa, doughnuts, and other treats.
When troops were on the move, their accompanying field kitchens could remain operational in transit, pulled along by mules or horses, smoke and all. Otherwise cooks set up camp far enough from the front so that their noise wouldn’t draw direct fire, but close enough so that the food could feasibly reach the troops. The resulting proximity to the war zone assured that stray artillery shells periodically became an added chef’s challenge. The cooked food was transported to the trenches in semi-insulated ceramic containers, but it rarely arrived hot because it could take an hour or more to cover the distance between cook and combat.
Soldiers learned to make a meal in just about any setting while serving in the trenches. A group of doughboys from the 102nd Infantry Regiment shared this communal repast during March 1918.
Twice daily, small parties of men were dispatched from the trenches to travel to camp and collect rations for their platoons. Sometimes animals helped carry the loads. Stealth played a role in successful food delivery since any obvious movement invited enemy fire. Extreme measures were taken—even slitting a donkey’s nostrils to prevent braying, for example—to assure that animals and clanging pans didn’t expose the travelers to machine-gun fire or shelling.
Otherwise, little suspense accompanied the arrival of the daily chow. Doughboys endured a monotonous diet of canned corned beef, other tinned meat, bacon, and various permutations of stew. They nicknamed the first dish “corned willy” and called the latter “slumgullion” or “slum.” French canned meat became known as “monkey meat.” Local potatoes, turnips, celery, and other vegetables livened things up at times, as did the local bread, “big, round loaves made from whole wheat, very nutritious and welcome to a hungry man,” as one soldier later described it. Stubby, when he wanted to supplement the morsels shared by Conroy and other soldiers, probably knew just where to find the cooks who would be willing to throw him a bone, or better.
During periods of intense shelling, the kitchens gave up cooking and sent field rations to the men—preserved or semiperishable foods such as canned sardines, cold cuts of meat, and instant coffee. These stores arrived in sealed metal containers (rat- and rainproof) that could sustain a designated group of men for four days at a time. Whether they ate fresh food or canned rations, the soldiers craved chocolate and other sweets; mostly they relied on packages from home to satisfy those tastes.
Conroy, Stubby, and the rest of the Yankee Division spent six weeks stationed alongside their French mentors near the Chemin des Dames, literally learning what it meant to be in the trenches. But before the Americans could undertake their final phase of training—joint military exercises with the United States Army’s 42nd Division—they found themselves on their own, transferred to more intense duty, their training suspended. The German spring offensive had begun, and it
s troops were penetrating established Allied lines. Training or no training, the time had come for U.S. soldiers to test their might. Could they turn the tide of war?
A domino-like reshuffling of troops began. General Pershing dispatched the U.S. First Division, which had completed its entire training program, to a hot spot near the French town of Cantigny. The Big Red One went on to gain infamous distinction in the ensuing bloody battle to retake and hold the town. Meanwhile, Conroy and his fellow soldiers were transported to fill the trenches being vacated by the First Division near Toul. The Yankee Division men had trained along the Chemin des Dames in the shadows of their French counterparts, practicing the basics of combat under this local guidance; in the Toul sector, they were assigned to defend territory on their own. From then on, the accelerating pace of the war assured that no other U.S. divisions (beyond the First) would complete the program of training originally envisioned for arriving troops.
Commanders for the 26th Division parceled out their forces to defend, as best they could, battle lines nearly 12 miles in length that had previously been guarded by both an American division and one of the typically smaller French ones. Spreading the 28,000-man force proportionally meant that fewer than 2,500 men covered each mile’s multiple bands of interconnected (and thus hard to defend) trenches. Fortunately the sector at least was considered a “quiet” one, subject only to routine artillery fire and periodic raids. It was, in fact, a place where divisions were historically sent to “rest” after having served in more stressful battle zones.
The Yankee Division’s duty there did not begin quietly, however. Although the relief of the First Division had been ordered to take place in secrecy, the Germans weren’t fooled. April showers—of rain and shells—challenged the men as they settled into their duties. Some soldiers reached the front, looked across No Man’s Land toward the German trenches, and could see signs posted by the enemy that read, with chilling sarcasm, “Welcome 26th Division.”
