Sergeant Stubby

by Ann Bausum

  The headquarters company for the 102nd set up its base in a small French village north of Toul named Beaumont, putting them not even two miles from the front lines. By the third of April, all the American troops were in place, and the rotation of shifts of doughboys into and out of the trenches had begun. Did Conroy take his turn in the trenches with Stubby? Maybe not on a routine basis, given his primary responsibilities through the headquarters company, but he almost certainly would have visited the tangled web of interconnecting passages to deliver dispatches, and he may well have stood on guard there, too. When not on duty, Stubby and Conroy bunked with other soldiers in an underground dugout near the Beaumont headquarters.

  Other members of Conroy’s 102nd Regiment were on duty during the predawn hours of April 20, when the Germans began shelling a front-line fortification known as the Sibille trench. About 350 men from Companies C and D of the regiment’s First Battalion had only just assumed responsibility for its defense when the intense barrage of artillery and poisonous gas began. The shelling coincided with a particularly rotten night of rainy weather, and it caught those on the receiving end at a moment of added vulnerability: This was their first night in the Sibille trench, and they were still familiarizing themselves with the layout of its defenses when the bombardment began.

  Around 5:30 a.m., some two and a half hours after commencing fire, the Germans stopped. This turn of events brought no comfort, for, as the men knew from their training, it often meant that enemy troops were preparing to enter the artillery-softened zone. An opaque fog, laced with smoke and gas, now hung over the territory, adding further advantage to the attackers. Then, at various points along the trench, groups of German Stosstruppen materialized out of the mist. The Americans immediately had to wonder: Was this an ordinary raid, designed to disrupt defenses and capture prisoners? Or was some larger maneuver under way?

  A fellow soldier sketched Robert Conroy as he relaxed in his bunk while stationed in Beaumont, France, during the spring of 1918. Stubby rests near his friend’s feet, nestled in bedding (just right of the center crease of the drawing).

  Not surprisingly, the intense German artillery barrage had severed the communication lines between field units and the rear command posts, leaving military tacticians with only the vaguest sense of what was transpiring along the front lines. In cases such as these, soldiers resorted to word-of-mouth and written communications instead. Because the Americans had no trained canine corps, they relied on human runners to carry such messages. These couriers, who sometimes traveled in pairs as a form of grim redundancy, left the comparative safety of their assigned posts and raced across open territory to convey battlefield reports and military orders. Such messengers were plucked from random duties—infantryman, auto mechanic, machine-gunner—because of their natural speed. That morning the battle zone descended into chaos so quickly, though, that reports were sporadic at best and hard to verify.

  Companies C and D mustered a hearty defense of the Sibille trench, but they were outnumbered some six to one, and, despite heroic combat, they could not repulse their attackers. Many doughboys fought to the death rather than submit to capture. Having overrun the Sibille trench, the Stosstruppen advanced toward the next Allied fortifications, including the adjacent town of Seicheprey. The remains of this battle-scarred hamlet served as the headquarters for the commander of the regiment’s First Battalion. When the Germans arrived, all the Americans joined in the defense of the territory, including a company cook who wielded a meat cleaver to deadly effect. The Germans, whose intentions had been to seize prisoners, not to hold territory, elected to withdraw rather than face such intense hand-to-hand combat.

  Rumors flew throughout the conflict: Everyone in the Sibille trench was dead; the Germans were still in Seicheprey; the Germans planned to capture a vital road corridor inside Allied territory. “There was too much racket to think,” one wounded man later observed, after he had crawled through machine-gunfire toward a medical station. The misinformation led to miscalculations, including the raining of friendly artillery fire on the Americans who had survived the attack on Seicheprey. Only the arrival of an intrepid runner at the gun batteries straightened out that mix-up.

  As news of the fight reached Colonel Parker back at the 102nd’s headquarters post in Beaumont, he ordered all hands into action. No one yet knew the attackers’ intentions. If the Germans were conducting more than a raid, he wanted to make sure the enemy breached no further trenches. Conroy grabbed his gun and, accompanied by Stubby, headed out to help reinforce the next line of defense. The high alert continued for hours.

  Communication remained poor, but it eventually became clear that the Germans were in retreat. As they reversed direction, the Germans occupied the Sibille trench once again, this time pivoting so that they used it in a defensive position, taking cover there as they fired on pursuing doughboys. When the gun batteries learned of this development, they began shelling the Germans in the Sibille trench. Surviving Germans continued their retreat under fire, forcing their new prisoners to not only retreat with them but also help carry wounded American and German soldiers from the battlefield.

  Conroy and Stubby remained on duty in the trenches through the hours of shelling and crossfire that followed the early-morning attack. That afternoon, as the fight seemed to wane, Stubby climbed to ground level and began to explore the forward territory. Then an unexpected enemy shell exploded near the exposed dog, and Stubby gave “a low howl of pain.” When Conroy crawled out to help his friend, he discovered that Stubby had been hit by shrapnel in his breast and left foreleg. The soldier returned with the dog to the relative safety of their trench and administered first aid as best he could. Before long, the threat of attack really had passed, and Conroy was called back with his fellow soldiers to their headquarters in Beaumont.

  Conroy entered the village carrying Stubby in his arms. A doctor at an Army first aid station saw the pair and called Conroy over so he could examine the mascot’s wounds. Stubby’s injuries were significant but not hopeless, he concluded, and he dressed them again. Then he ordered Conroy to place his friend alongside other wounded in a waiting ambulance. The ambulance was bound for a nearby field hospital, and the doctor knew that surgeons there could properly clean out and stitch up the dog’s injuries. That the animal would even receive such notice, particularly on what was arguably the gravest day of fighting yet seen by the Yankee Division, attests to the popularity of the mascot within his regiment and beyond. “For days there was deep gloom in the outfit lest ‘Stubby’ should not get well,” a newspaper account later claimed. Conroy undoubtedly worried about his companion. Spirits surely lifted when word came that the dog would recover.

  By the time of the battle of Seicheprey, as it came to be known, a year had passed since Woodrow Wilson’s call to arms. The men of the YD had weathered almost three months of combat duty by this point, and they understood, in a way that only war’s eyewitnesses really can, the full weight of the expression “War is hell.” The soldiers who did the best in this war zone, as in others, were the ones who adapted to the unnatural scene. The war became their job, and they stuck with it the way they had stuck with unpleasant work at home. Wet feet, ever present shelling, cold food, rats, lice, and the constant fear of calamity became a way of life. Thoughts of home, a sense of duty, the camaraderie of fellow soldiers served as tonics for the hardships. Robert Conroy had an added ally in the fight: Stubby.

  Conroy later described Stubby as his “closest companion … during the war.” Almost a century after his service, the soldier’s eldest grandson, Curtis Deane, recalls that his grandfather was “very quiet” about what he did during the war. “He would just say, ‘I was with Stubby.’ ” Deane notes that their bond went deeper than mere companionship. “Their relationship was seamless. They were one.” Deane adds: “I have to tell you, that man was devoted to that dog,” adding, “The dog may have been what got him through the war.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUMMER C
AMPAIGNS

  IT TOOK MORE THAN A MONTH FOR STUBBY TO FULLY RECOVER from his wounds. But, “like the proverbial cat,” Robert Conroy later wrote, Stubby “seemed to have many lives.” By the time the mascot returned to duty in early June, things were looking up for the Yankee Division. True, almost 200 Americans had been captured by the Germans during the raid of the Sibille trench, but casualties from the day’s fighting, which became known as the battle of Seicheprey, were not as high as originally feared. Furthermore, the Germans, who had suffered 300 or more casualties in the exchange, seemed reluctant to tangle unnecessarily with the tenacious fighters of the 26th Division; they had barely challenged their American neighbors since the engagement on April 20. Plus the weather had turned at last. For almost the first time since reaching France, the Yankee Division doughboys could enjoy living outdoors.

  A series of surviving photographs attests to the fine weather—and to the bond that had grown between Conroy and Stubby. At some point, perhaps as early as 1918, Conroy purchased a leather-bound scrapbook and began documenting his friend’s life. He eventually glued a collection of five photographs onto one of the album’s oversize black leaves and added a white-inked caption in his graceful penmanship at the bottom of the page. “Stubby at Beaumont France,” it read. In one of the five sepia-toned prints, viewers see Stubby with a hangdog expression, head cocked to one side, ears up, tongue hanging out, as he studies the photographer who has gotten down to eye level to snap the picture.

  There’s a photo of Stubby seated on the hood of an ambulance, his head turned toward the three soldiers perched behind the dashboard. Conroy stands beside the dog and one wonders, Could this be the ambulance crew that transported the wounded mascot to the hospital? The answer is impossible to know. Another image captures Stubby standing on his hind legs, his front ones grasped by Conroy on one side and an unidentified pipe-toting fellow doughboy on the other. The stranger could be one of any 1,000 soldiers whom Stubby had befriended.

  Conroy and Stubby pose alone in the remaining pair of photos. In one, Conroy crouches down and has scooped Stubby up so that the animal sits on his bent leg. The man’s right arm encircles the dog’s shoulder in the same sort of securing grip that a human might use when posing with a close friend. Stubby’s head is level with his companion’s, but his gaze is focused on an off-camera distraction. Conroy beams at the lens.

  There is nothing posed about the final image. It’s as if the photographer clicked the shutter during one of those random moments before or after the posing of a shot. It’s a sunny day. Conroy, standing beneath a large tree, looks down at Stubby who has reared back on his hind legs so that he can rest his front paws on Conroy’s left thigh. Stubby’s head is upturned, his eyes locked on Conroy’s downward gaze. The image captures the essence of their bond, such a natural fit of friendship, trust, and unconditional love. Conroy’s military uniform and the Army truck parked in the photo’s background attest to the fact that a war is going on around the pair, but such details seem inconsequential. The frozen moment embodies the sentiment of Conroy’s grandson: Stubby and Conroy were one.

  Stubby was back in fine form, having fully recovered from his April 20 shrapnel wound, when he rejoined Robert Conroy near the front lines in early June 1918.

  The war hadn’t gone away, though. Life in the Toul sector may have remained quiet, for a war zone, but there were still periodic raids across No Man’s Land, artillery batteries still exchanged fire, and soldiers continued to live in that mental zone where what is, is—until it’s not. Then, in late June, rumors began to circulate that the men had earned a break: They would receive furloughs; they were headed to Paris; they’d been asked to march in a Fourth of July parade. Hooray! After spending the better part of five months in the trenches, any or all of such options sounded better than staying in place.

  The rumors took on the ring of truth when, soon after, the division was ordered out of the trenches and sent to a rail yard. Soldiers piled enthusiastically into 40 & 8s on a train headed toward Paris. Fantastic! Bystanders waved and cheered at the doughboys throughout the trip, and the men “shouted back until they were hoarse.” When at last the Eiffel Tower appeared in the distance, excitement swelled among the men. All their anticipation evaporated, however, when the travelers felt their railcars being shunted onto an alternate set of tracks. Instead of continuing toward the French capital, this rail line led back toward the battlefront. Local residents still waved and cheered as the troops passed by, “but the boys had nothing left for response but a sad wave of the hand.”

  With that, Conroy, Stubby, and the rest of the Yankee Division moved from the relative quiet of the Toul sector to a much hotter front: the Marne. This region east of Paris, bisected by the Marne River, had hosted the first battle of the Marne in the opening months of the war. In late May 1918, the Germans began trying once again to push through the Allied defenses toward Paris. Fighting had already raged for more than a month by the time the YD arrived on the scene. At great cost, Marines from the Second Division had retaken some of the land lost during the initial German assault. Now the 26th Division was tasked with defending the gains and preparing for further attacks.

  The men didn’t have long to wait. On July 15 the Germans tried again to crash through the Allied lines along the extensive front. They failed. The war’s duration had begun to take its toll, both on the German front lines and back at home. A successful Allied naval blockade was hampering Germany’s ability to feed its citizens, and the ranks of its army contained fewer and fewer able-bodied and experienced fighters. Meanwhile, each month hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had begun landing in Europe. The Allies’ increasingly well-fortified defenses, including the addition of the Yankee Division outside Château-Thierry, were becoming impenetrable. By July 17 the Germans had abandoned their assault.

  The tide of the war was turning, and the Allies took the offensive starting on July 18. Working in concert, multiple divisions of French and American soldiers began to press eastward against the German lines; meanwhile, the German forces began an organized retreat, relinquishing land, but at the price of high Allied casualties, using the time created by combat delays to salvage matériel and men for later use in its defense. In reply, the Allies tried to squeeze the Germans into a tighter and tighter wedge of territory, hoping to capture prisoners and hardware as they progressed.

  Conroy’s responsibilities shifted with the change from defensive to offensive fighting. Now he helped to track the direction and nature of the German retreat, transmitting that intelligence back to command posts himself or via other messengers. Such information helped to inform military leaders as they plotted how best to pursue and intercept the retreating forces. Whether or not Stubby accompanied Conroy during such work went unrecorded, but the dog had to keep up with someone during the constantly shifting battlefront, and it seems likely that he hung close by Conroy during at least some of this reconnaissance work.

  Yard by yard, and eventually mile by mile, the Allies pressed onward. Gone were the trenches of the Toul sector. Much of this fighting took place in the open, across fields of ripened wheat. The lack of cover exposed the advancing soldiers to horrendous machine-gun fire and left them with few places to shelter during artillery bombardments.

  Making matters worse, the movements of infantrymen on the ever shifting battleground frequently outpaced those of artillery units. Ideally the artillery was supposed to operate as a sort of rolling barrage, delivering rounds of fire on enemy positions and thus softening up the territory that the infantry would proceed to seize. Then the artillery would advance, and the one-two maneuver would repeat itself. But as the pace of the advance quickened and the battlefields became cratered from waves of shelling, the artillery units found it hard to keep up.

  The Allied offensive continued night and day. Soldiers discarded gear as they maneuvered in the summer heat, only to find themselves without shelter or cover during the odd moments when they were allowed to rest. The rolling kitc
hen wagons frequently fell behind in their pursuit of the troops, leaving the doughboys to subsist on emergency rations of hardtack.

  The switch from defensive to offensive fighting exposed the Allied soldiers to a new measure of their progress: dead bodies. Their maneuvers netted them plenty of live ones, too, in the form of German prisoners of war. Meanwhile, fallen Allied comrades joined the landscape of mayhem, cut down by relentless rounds of machine-gun fire and shelling. At its worst, the fighting deteriorated into life-and-death struggles of hand-to-hand combat.

  The capture of German soldiers and the wounding of American ones created new ways for Stubby to serve the war effort: He became a rescue dog. How much training he underwent is unknown, but in short order the seasoned mascot proved adept at finding and comforting wounded men. He, as with other rescue dogs, learned to bypass German soldiers in favor of Allied ones. His ability to sniff out surviving humans whose presence might be obscured by waves of golden wheat made him particularly useful to the humans he assisted.

  When Stubby found a soldier, he would either remain with him until help arrived or return to fetch the medics. If someone was dying, Stubby offered companionship so that the man would not die alone. Such work went on regardless of battlefield conditions. Thus, the already stressful task of hunting for and rescuing wounded men could become complicated by the added danger of dodging artillery shells. Fallen soldiers might languish for hours awaiting care. The lucky ones progressed up the chain of care, as needed, from battlefield aid stations to mobile field hospitals to established military hospitals.