The guest had decided to wait until next morning, before leaving The
Place, instead of following his first plan of taking a night train to
New York. He was a captain in our regular army and had newly come back
from France to forget an assortment of shrapnel-bites and to teach
practical tactics to rookies.
He reached his decision to remain over night at The Place while he and
the Mistress and the Master were sitting on the vine-hung west veranda
after dinner, watching the flood of sunset change the lake to molten
gold and the sky to pink fire. It would be pleasant to steal another
few hours at this back-country House of Peace before returning to the
humdrum duties of camp. And the guest yielded to the temptation.
"I'm mighty glad you can stay over till morning," said the Master.
"I'll send word to Roberts not to bring up the car."
As he spoke, he scrawled a penciled line on an envelope-back; then he
whistled.
From a cool lounging-place beneath the wistaria-vines arose a huge
collie--stately of form, dark brown and white of coat, deep-set of eye
and with a head that somehow reminded one of a Landseer engraving. The
collie trotted up the steps of the veranda and stood expectant before
the Master. The latter had been folding the envelope lengthwise. Now he
slipped it through the ring in the dog's collar.
"Give it to Roberts," he said.
The big collie turned and set off at a hand-gallop.
"Good!" approved the guest. "Bruce didn't seem to be in any doubt as to
what you wanted him to do. He knows where Roberts is likely to be?"
"No," said the Master. "But he can track him and find him, if Roberts
is anywhere within a mile or so from here. That was one of the first
things we taught him--to carry messages. All we do is to slip the paper
into his collar-ring and tell him the name of the person to take it to.
Naturally, he knows us all by name. So it is easy enough for him to do
it. We look on the trick as tremendously clever. But that's because we
love Bruce. Almost any dog can be taught to do it, I suppose. We--"
"You're mistaken!" corrected the guest. "Almost any dog CAN'T be taught
to. Some dogs can, of course; but they are the exception. I ought to
know, for I've been where dog-couriers are a decidedly important
feature of trench-warfare. I stopped at one of the dog-training schools
in England, too, on my way back from Picardy, and watched the teaching
of the dogs that are sent to France and Flanders. Not one in ten can be
trained to carry messages; and not one in thirty can be counted on to
do it reliably. You ought to be proud of Bruce."
"We are," replied the Mistress. "He is one of the family. We think
everything of him. He was such a stupid and awkward puppy, too! Then,
in just a few months, he shaped up, as he is now. And his brain woke."
Bruce interrupted the talk by reappearing on the veranda. The folded
envelope was still in the ring on his collar. The guest glanced
furtively at the Master, expecting some sign of chagrin at the collie's
failure.
Instead, the Master took the envelope, unfolded it and glanced at a
word or two that had been written beneath his own scrawl; then he made
another penciled addition to the envelope's writing, stuck the twisted
paper back into the ring and said--
"Roberts."
Off trotted Bruce on his second trip.
"I had forgotten to say which train you'll have to take in the
morning," explained the Master. "So Roberts wrote, asking what time he
was to have the car at the door after breakfast. It was careless of me."
The guest did not answer. But when Bruce presently returned,--this time
with no paper in his collar-ring,--the officer passed his hand
appraisingly through the dog's heavy coat and looked keenly down into
his dark eyes.
"Gun-shy?" asked the guest. "Or perhaps he's never heard a gun fired?"
"He's heard hundreds of guns fired," said the Master. "I never allow a
gun to be fired on The Place, of course, because we've made it a bird
refuge. But Bruce went with us in the car to the testing of the Lewis
machineguns, up at Haskell. They made a most ungodly racket. But
somehow it didn't seem to bother the Big Dog at all."
"H'm!" mused the guest, his professional interest vehemently roused.
"He would be worth a fortune over there. There are a lot of collies in
the service, in one capacity or another--almost as many as the
Airedales and the police dogs. And they are doing grand work. But I
never saw one that was better fitted for it than Bruce. It's a pity he
lives on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He could do his bit, to more
effect than the average human. There are hundreds of thousands of men
for the ranks, but pitifully few perfect courier-dogs."
The Mistress was listening with a tensity which momentarily grew more
painful. The Master's forehead, too, was creased with a new thought
that seemed to hurt him. To break the brief silence that followed the
guest's words, he asked:
"Are the dogs, over there, really doing such great work as the papers
say they are? I read, the other day--"
"'Great work!'" repeated the guest. "I should say so. Not only in
finding the wounded and acting as guards on listening posts, and all
that, but most of all as couriers. There are plenty of times when the
wireless can't be used for sending messages from one point to another,
and where there is no telephone connection, and where the firing is too
hot for a human courier to get through. That is where is the war dogs
have proved their weight in radium. Collies, mostly. There are a
million true stories of their prowess told, at camp-fires. Here are
just two such incidents--both of them on record, by the way, at the
British War Office
"A collie, down near Soissons, was sent across a bad strip of
fire-scourged ground, with a message. A boche sharpshooter fired at him
and shattered his jaw. The dog kept on, in horrible agony, and
delivered the message. Another collie was sent over a still hotter and
much longer stretch of territory with a message. (That was during the
Somme drive of 1916.) He was shot at, a dozen times, as he ran. At last
two bullets got him. He fell over, mortally wounded. He scrambled to
his feet and kept on falling, stumbling, staggering--till he got to his
destination. Then he dropped dead at the side of the Colonel the
message had been sent to. And those are only two of thousands of true
collie-anecdotes. Yet some fools are trying to get American dogs done
away with, as 'non-utilitarian,' while the war lasts! As if the dogs in
France, today, weren't earning their overseas brothers' right to
live--and live well!"
Neither of his hearers made reply when the guest finished his earnest,
eager recital. Neither of them had paid much heed to his final words.
For the Master and the Mistress were looking at each other in mute
unhappiness. The same miserable thought was in the mind of each. And
each knew the thought that was torturing the mind of the other.
Presently, at a glint of inquiry in the Master's eye, the Mistress
suddenly bent over and buried her face in the deep mass of Bruce's ruff
as the dog stood lovingly beside her. Then, still stroking the collie's
silken head, she returned her husband's wretchedly questioning glance
with a resigned little nod. The Master cleared his throat noisily
before he could speak with the calm indifference he sought. Then,
turning to the apparently unnoticing guest, he said--
"I think I told you I tried to get across to France at the very
start--and I was barred because I am past forty and because I have a
bum heart and several other defects that a soldier isn't supposed to
have. My wife and I have tried to do what little we can for the Cause,
on this side of the ocean. But it has seemed woefully little, when we
remember what others are doing. And we have no son we can send."
Again he cleared his throat and went on with sulky ungraciousness:
"We both know what you've been driving at for the past five minutes.
And--and we agree. Bruce can go."
"Great!" applauded the guest. "That's fine! He'll be worth his--"
"If you think we're a couple of fools for not doing this more
willingly," went on the Master with savage earnestness, "just stop to
think what it means to a man to give up the dog he loves. Not to give
him up to some one who will assure him a good home, but to send him
over into that hell, where a German bullet or a shell-fragment or
hunger or disease is certain to get him, soon or late. To think of him
lying smashed and helpless, somewhere in No Man's Land, waiting for
death; or caught by the enemy and eaten! (The Red Cross bulletin says
no less than eight thousand dogs were eaten, in Saxony alone, in 1913,
the year BEFORE the war began.) Or else to be captured and then cut up
by some German vivisector-surgeon in the sacred interests of Science!
Oh, we can bring ourselves to send Bruce over there! But don't expect
us to do it with a good grace. For we can't."
"I--" began the embarrassed guest; but the Mistress chimed in, her
sweet voice not quite steady.
"You see, Captain, we've made such a pet--such a baby--of Bruce! All
his life he has lived here--here where he had the woods to wander in
and the lake to swim in, and this house for his home. He will be so
unhappy and--Well, don't let's talk about that! When I think of the
people who give their sons and everything they have, to the country, I
feel ashamed of not being more willing to let a mere dog go. But then
Bruce is not just a 'mere dog.' He is--he is BRUCE. All I ask is that
if he is injured and not killed, you'll arrange to have him sent back
here to us. We'll pay for it, of course. And will you write to whomever
you happen to know, at that dog-training school in England, and ask
that Bruce be treated nicely while he is training there? He's never
been whipped. He's never needed it, you see."
The Mistress might have spared herself much worry as to Bruce's
treatment in the training school to which he was consigned. It was not
a place of cruelty, but of development. And when, out of the thousands
of dogs sent there, the corps of trainers found one with promise of
strong ability, such a pupil was handled with all the care and
gentleness and skill that a temperamental prima donna might expect.
Such a dog was the big American collie, debarked from a goods car at
the training camp railway station, six weeks after the Mistress and the
Master had consented to his enlistment. And the handlers treated him
accordingly.
The Master himself had taken Bruce to the transport, in Brooklyn, and
had led him aboard the overfull ship. The new sights and sounds around
him interested the home-bred collie. But when the Master turned him
over to the officer in whose charge he was to be for the voyage,
Bruce's deep-set eyes clouded with a sudden heartsick foreboding.
Wrenching himself free from the friendly hand on his collar, he sprang
in pursuit of his departing deity,--the loved Master who was leaving
him alone and desolate among all these strange scenes and noises. The
Master, plodding, sullen and heavy-hearted, toward the gangway, was
aware of a cold nose thrust into his dejected hand.
Looking down he beheld Bruce staring up at him with a world of stark
appeal in his troubled gaze. The Master swallowed hard; then laid his
hand on the beautiful head pressed so confidingly against his knee.
Turning, he led the dog back to the quarters assigned to him.
"Stay here, old friend!" he commanded, huskily. "It's all right. You'll
make good. I know that. And there's a chance in a billion that you'll
come back to us. I'm--I'm not deserting you. And I guess there's
precious little danger that any one on The Place will ever forget you.
It's--it's all right. Millions of humans are doing it. I'd give
everything I've got, if I could go, too. IT'S ALL RIGHT!"
Then Bruce understood at last that he was to stay in this place of
abominations, far from everything he loved; and that he must do so
because the Master ordained it. He made no further effort to break away
and to follow his god ashore. But he shivered convulsively from head to
foot; and his desolate gaze continued to trace the Master's receding
figure out of sight. Then, with a long sigh, he lay down, heavily, his
head between his white forepaws, and resigned himself to whatever of
future misery his deities might have ordained for him.
Ensued a fortnight of mental and bodily anguish, as the inland-reared
dog tasted the horrors of a voyage in a rolling ship, through heaving
seas. Afterward, came the landing at a British port and the train ride
to the camp which was to be his home for the next three months.
Bruce's sense of smell told him the camp contained more dogs than ever
he had beheld in all his brief life put together. But his hearing would
have led him to believe there were not a dozen other dogs within a mile
of him.
From the encampment arose none of the rackety barking which betokens
the presence of many canines, and which deafens visitors to a dog-show.
One of the camp's first and most stringent rules forbade barking,
except under special order. These dogs--or the pick of them--were
destined for work at the front. The bark of a dog has a carrying
quality greater than the combined shouting of ten men. It is the last
sound to follow a balloonist, after he has risen above the reach of all
other earth-noises.
Hence, a chance bark, rising through the night to where some enemy
airman soared with engines turned off, might well lead to the bombing
of hitherto unlocated trenches or detachment-camps. For this and divers
other reasons, the first lesson taught to arriving wardogs was to
abstain from barking.
The dogs were divided, roughly, by breeds, as regarded the line of
training assigned to them. The collies were taught courier-work. The
Airedales, too,--hideous, cruel, snake-headed,--were used as couriers,
as well as to bear Red Cross supplies and to hunt for the wounded. The
gaunt and wolflike police dogs were pressed into the two latter tasks,
and were taught listening-post duty. And so on through all available
breeds,--including the stolidly wise Old English sheepdogs who were to
prove invaluable in finding and succoring and reporting the
wounded,--down to the humble terriers and mongrels who were taught to
rid trenches of vermin.
Everywhere was quiet efficiency and tirelessly patient and skillful
work on the part of the trainers. For Britain's best dog men had been
recruited for service here. On the perfection of their charges'
training might depend the fate of many thousand gallant soldiers.
Wherefore, the training was perfect.
Hundreds of dogs proved stupid or unreliable or gun-shy or too easily
confused in moments of stress. These were weeded out, continually, and
shipped back to the masters who had proffered them.
Others developed with amazing speed and cleverness, grasping their
profession as could few human soldiers. And Bruce, lonely and
heartsore, yet throwing himself into his labors with all the zest of
the best thoroughbred type,--was one of this group.
His early teachings now stood him in good stead. What once had been a
jolly game, for his own amusement and that of the Mistress and the
Master, was now his life-work. Steadily his trainer wrought over him,
bringing out latent abilities that would have dumfounded his earliest
teachers, steadying and directing the gayly dashing intelligence;
upbuilding and rounding out all his native gifts.
A dog of Bruce's rare type made up to the trainers for the dullness of
their average pupils. He learned with bewildering ease. He never forgot
a lesson once taught.
No, the Mistress need not have interceded to save him from beating. As
soon would an impresario think of thrashing Caruso or Paderewski as
would Bruce's glum Scottish trainer have laid whip to this best pupil
of his. Life was bare and strict for Bruce. But life was never unkind
to him, in these first months of exile from The Place. And, bit by bit,
he began to take a joy in his work.
Not for a day,--perhaps not for an hour, did the big collie forget the
home of his babyhood or those he had delighted to worship, there. And
the look of sadness in his dark eyes became a settled aspect. Yet,
here, there was much to interest and to excite him. And he grew to look
forward with pleasure to his daily lessons.
At the end of three months, he was shipped to France. There his
seemingly aimless studies at the training camp were put to active use.
* * * * *
At the foot of the long Flanders hill-slope the "Here-We-Come"
Regiment, of mixed American and French infantry, held a
caterpillar-shaped line of trenches.
To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire
regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall. On the left were two
French regiments. In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile
distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the
contour of the German first-line trenches.
The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British
troops on either side of them--the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend
what was known as a "quiet" sector. Behind the hill, and on loftier
heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted. Somewhere in
the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.
It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings
of the Here-We-Comes. For, with no warning at all, those entire
surroundings were about to be changed.
Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the
congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive
points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft
enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad
Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had
been chosen for such a minor blow.
The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a
belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended
front trenches. For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper
heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting
there aimlessly. They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that
crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth. And those
"eyes" had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had
discerned and had duly reported it.
The attack might come in a day. It might not come in a week. But it was
coming--unless the behind-the-lines preparations were a gigantic feint.
A quiet dawn, in the quiet trenches of the quiet sector. Desultory
artillery and somewhat less desultory sniping had prevailed throughout
the night, and at daybreak; but nothing out of the ordinary.
Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious
sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet. A shell had
burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and
half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth. Otherwise,
things were drowsily dull.
In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,--formerly of Uncle Sam's
regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale
of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry. The
Frenchman was slow in learning poker's mysteries.
And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced
to play for I.O.U's--which is stupid sport, at best.
So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a
half-dozen sharpshooters' rifles, all three men looked up from their
desultory game in real interest. Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.
"Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the
sandbags without drawing boche fire," he hazarded, starting out to
investigate. "It's a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through
heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers'."
But Mahan's strictures were quite unwarranted. The sharpshooters were
not firing at the parapet. Their scattering shots were flying high, and
hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.
Adown this shell-pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed
idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The
morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur,
showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it. His white chest was like a
snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles. A bullet or
two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.
A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing
dog.
"Why, it's Bruce!" cried Mahan in glad welcome. "I might 'a' known he
or another of the collies would be along. I might 'a' known it, when
the telephones went out of commission. He--"
"Regardez-donc!" interrupted the admiring Vivier. "He acts like bullets
was made of flies! Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!"
"Yes," growled Dale worriedly; "and one of these days a bullet will
find its way into that splendid carcass of his. He's been shot at, a
thousand times, to my own knowledge. And all I ask is a chance, with a
rifle-butt, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!"
"Downs Bruce?" queried Vivier in fine scorn. "The boche he is no borned
who can do it. Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the 'charm
life.' He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes.
I've watch heem. I know."
Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a
halt at the edge of a traverse. There he stood, wagging his plume of a
tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up
to lift him bodily into the trench.
A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog's collar and posted off
to the colonel with it.
The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the
supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes. It bade
the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at
nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest.
The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly
manned to resist a mass attack. Wherefore the drawing-in and
consolidating of the whole outflung line.
Bruce, his work done now, had leisure to respond to the countless
offers of hospitality that encompassed him. One man brought him a slice
of cold broiled bacon. Another spread pork-grease over a bit of bread
and proffered it. A third unearthed from some sacredly guarded
hiding-place an excessively stale half-inch square of sweet chocolate.
Had the dog so chosen, he might then and there have eaten himself to
death on the multitude of votive offerings. But in a few minutes he had
had enough, and he merely sniffed in polite refusal at all further
gifts.
"See?" lectured Mahan. "That's the beast of it! When you say a fellow
eats or drinks 'like a beast,' you ought to remember that a beast won't
eat or drink a mouthful more than is good for him."
"Gee!" commented the somewhat corpulent Dale. "I'm glad I'm not a
beast--especially on pay-day."
Presently Bruce tired of the ovation tendered him. These ovations were
getting to be an old story. They had begun as far back as his
training-camp days--when the story of his joining the army was told by
the man to whom The Place's guest had written commending the dog to the
trainers' kindness.
At the training-camp this story had been reenforced by the chief
collie-teacher--a dour little Hieland Scot named McQuibigaskie, who on
the first day declared that the American dog had more sense and more
promise and more soul "than a' t'other tykes south o' Kirkcudbright
Brae."
Being only mortal, Bruce found it pleasanter to be admired and petted
than ignored or kicked. He was impersonally friendly with the soldiers,
when he was off duty; and he relished the dainties they were forever
thrusting at him.
But at times his soft eyes would grow dark with homesickness for the
quiet loveliness of The Place and for the Mistress and the Master who
were his loyally worshiped gods. Life had been so happy and so sweetly
uneventful for him, at The Place! And there had been none of the awful
endless thunder and the bewilderingly horrible smells and gruesome
sights which here met him at every turn.
The dog's loving heart used to grow sick with it all; and he longed
unspeakably for home. But he was a gallant soldier, and he did his work
not only well, but with a snap and a dash and an almost uncanny
intelligence which made him an idol to the men.
Presently, now, having eaten all he wanted and having been patted and
talked to until he craved solitude, Bruce strolled ever to an empty
dugout, curled up on a torn blanket there, put his nose between his
white paws and went to sleep.
The German artillery-fire had swelled from an occasional explosion to a
ceaseless roar, that made the ground vibrate and heave, and that beat
on the eardrums with nauseating iterance. But it did not bother Bruce.
For months he had been used to this sort of annoyance, and he had
learned to sleep snugly through it all.
Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying rate.
The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale activity. Far
to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment's trenches a haze had begun
to crawl along the ground and to send snaky tendrils high in
air-tendrils that blended into a single grayish-green wall as they
moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple
tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the
Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of
billowing gas.
The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned masks.
But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the sudden
wind--freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft
in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and
left, leaving the central trenches clear.
Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a
gas-demonstration, can mean but one thing: a general attack. Therefore
telephonic word came to the detachments to left and right of the
Here-We-Comes, to fall back, under cover of the gas-cloud, to safer
positions. Two dogs were sent, with the same order, to the
Here-We-Comes. (One of the dogs was gassed. A bit of shrapnel found the
other.)
Thus it was that the Here-We-Comes were left alone (though they did not
know it), to hold the position,--with no support on either side, and
with a mere handful of men wherewith to stem the impending rush.
On the heels of the dispersing gas-cloud, and straight across the
half-mile or less of broken ground, came a line of gray. In five
successive waves, according to custom, the boches charged. Each wave
hurled itself forward as fast as efficiency would let it, in face of
the opposing fire, and as far as human endurance would be goaded. Then
it went down, and its survivors attached themselves to the succeeding
wave.
Hence, by the time the fifth and mightiest wave got into motion, it was
swelled by the survivors of all four of its predecessors and was an
all-but-resistless mass of shouting and running men.
The rifles and machine-guns of the Here-We-Comes played merrily into
the advancing gray swarms, stopping wave after wave, and at last
checking the fifth and "master" wave almost at the very brink of the
Franco-American parapet.
"That's how they do!" Mahan pantingly explained to a rather shaky
newcomer, as the last wave fell back. "They count on numbers and
bullrushes to get them there. If they'd had ten thousand men, in that
rush, instead of five thousand, they'd have got us. And if they had
twice as many men in their whole army as they have, they'd win this
war. But praise be, they haven't twice as many! That is one of the
fifty-seven reasons why the Allies are going to lick Germany."
Mahan talked jubilantly. The same jubilation ran all along the line of
victors. But the colonel and his staff were not rejoicing. They had
just learned of the withdrawal of the forces to either side of them,
and they knew they themselves could not hope to stand against a second
and larger charge.
Such a charge the enemy were certain to make. The Germans, too, must
soon learn of the defection of the supports. It was now only a question
of an hour or less before a charge with a double-enveloping movement
would surround and bag the Here-We-Comes, catching the whole regiment
in an inescapable trap.
To fall back, now, up that long bare hillside, under full fire of the
augmented German artillery, would mean a decimating of the entire
command. The Here-We-Comes could not retreat. They could not hope to
hold their ground. The sole chance for life lay in the arrival of
strong reenforcements from the rear, to help them hold the trenches
until night, or to man the supporting positions. Reserves were within
easy striking distance. But, as happened so many times in the war,
there was no routine way to summon them in time.
It was the chance sight of a crumpled message lying on his dugout-table
that reminded the colonel of Bruce's existence and of his presence in
the front trench. It was a matter of thirty seconds for the colonel to
scrawl an urgent appeal and a brief statement of conditions. Almost as
soon as the note was ready, an orderly appeared at the dugout entrance,
convoying the newly awakened Bruce.
The all-important message was fastened in place. The colonel himself
went to the edge of the traverse, and with his own arms lifted the
eighty-pound collie to the top.
There was tenderness as well as strength in the lifting arms. As he set
Bruce down on the brink, the colonel said, as if speaking to a
fellow-human:
"I hate to do it, old chap. I HATE to! There isn't one chance in three
of your getting all the way up the hill alive. But there wouldn't be
one chance in a hundred, for a MAN. The boches will be on the lookout
for just this move. And their best sharpshooters will be waiting for
you--even if you dodge the shrapnel and the rest of the artillery. I'm
sorry! And--good-by."
Then, tersely, he rasped out the command--
"Bruce! Headquarters! Headquarters! QUICK!"
At a bound, the dog was gone.
Breasting the rise of the hill, Bruce set off at a sweeping run, his
tawny-and-white mane flying in the wind.
A thousand eyes, from the Here-We-Come trenches, watched his flight.
And as many eyes from the German lines saw the huge collie's dash up
the coverless slope.
Scarce had Bruce gotten fairly into his stride when the boche bullets
began to sing--not a desultory little flurry of shots, as before; but
by the score, and with a murderous earnestness. When he had appeared,
on his way to the trenches, an hour earlier, the Germans had opened
fire on him, merely for their own amusement--upon the same merry
principle which always led them to shoot at an Ally war-dog. But now
they understood his all-important mission; and they strove with their
best skill to thwart it.
The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between his
teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had been a move
of stark military necessity. And there was an off chance that it might
mean the saving of his whole command.
But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the
frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a creature.
The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog, kicking up tiny
swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him and to either side.
Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips, recalled the
French sergeant's theory that Bruce bore a charmed life. And he prayed
that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer was very little faith.
For under such a fusillade it seemed impossible that at least one
highpower bullet should not reach the collie before the slope could be
traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a
bullet--especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of
wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight
ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his
run.
Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the
hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some
shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he
bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far
side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a
distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters'
task anything but an exact science.
Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than
three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the
luxury of a broad grin.
"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he
vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that
can get--"
Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new
note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.
"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian
swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"
In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring
cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets hit the upper hillside in swathes,
beginning a few yards behind the flying collie and moving upward toward
him like a sweeping of an unseen scythe.
"That's the wind-up!" groaned Mahan. "Lord, send me an even break
against one of those Hun machinegunners some day! If--"
Again Mahan failed to finish his train of thought. He stared
open-mouthed up the hill. Almost at the very summit, within a rod or
two of the point where the crest would intervene between him and his
foes, Bruce whirled in mid-air and fell prone.
The fast-following swaths of machine-gun bullets had not reached him.
But another German enemy had. From behind a heap of offal, on the
crest, a yellow-gray dog had sprung, and had launched himself bodily
upon Bruce's flank as the unnoticing collie had flashed past him.
The assailant was an enormous and hyena-like German police-dog. He was
one of the many of his breed that were employed (for work or food) in
the German camps, and which used to sneak away from their hard-kicking
soldier-owners to ply a more congenial trade as scavengers, and as
seekers for the dead. For, in traits as well as in looks, the
police-dog often emulates the ghoulish hyena.
Seeing the approaching collie (always inveterate foe of his kind), the
police-dog had gauged the distance and had launched his surprise attack
with true Teuton sportsmanship and efficiency. Down went Bruce under
the fierce weight that crashed against his shoulder. But before the
other could gain his coveted throat-grip, Bruce was up again. Like a
furry whirlwind he was at the police-dog, fighting more like a wolf
than a civilized collie--tearing into his opponent with a maniac rage,
snapping, slashing; his glittering white fangs driving at a dozen
vulnerable points in a single second.
It was as though Bruce knew he had no time to waste from his
life-and-death mission. He could not elude this enemy, so he must
finish him as quickly as possible.
"Give me your rifle!" sputtered Mahan to the soldier nearest him. "I'll
take one potshot at that Prussian cur, before the machine-guns get the
two of 'em. Even if I hit Bruce by mistake, he'd rather die by a
Christian Yankee-made bullet than--"
Just then the scythelike machine-gun fire reached the hillcrest
combatants. And in the same instant a shell smote the ground,
apparently between them. Up went a geyser of smoke and dirt and rocks.
When the cloud settled, there was a deep gully in the ground where a
moment earlier Bruce and the police-dog had waged their death-battle.
"That settles it!" muttered the colonel.
And he went to make ready for such puny defense as his men might hope
to put up against the German rush.
While these futile preparations were still under way, terrific
artillery fire burst from the Allied batteries behind the hill,
shielding the Here-We-Come trenches with a curtain of fire whose lower
folds draped themselves right unlovingly around the German lines. Under
cover of this barrage, down the hill swarmed the Allied reserves!
"How did you get word?" demanded the astonished colonel of the
Here-We-Comes, later in the day.
"From your note, of course," replied the general he had questioned.
"The collie--old Bruce."
"Bruce?" babbled the colonel foolishly.
"Of course," answered the general. "Who else? But I'm afraid it's the
last message he'll ever deliver. He came rolling and staggering up to
headquarters--one mass of blood, and three inches thick with caked
dirt. His right side was torn open from a shell-wound, and he had two
machine-gun bullets in his shoulder. He's deaf as a post, too, from
shell-shock. He tumbled over in a heap on the steps of headquarters.
But he GOT there. That's Bruce, all over. That's the best type of
collie, all over. Some of us were for putting him out of his misery
with a shot through the head. We'd have done it, too, if it had been
any other dog. But the surgeon-general waded in and took a hand in the
game--carried Bruce to his own quarters. We left him working over the
dog himself. And he swears Bruce will pull through!"