New Haven, Connecticut. July 1917.
The Yale Bowl was the largest football stadium in the United States, and in the summer of 1917 it was not being used for football. Its wide grassy infield had been converted into a military training ground for the 102nd Infantry Regiment of the 26th "Yankee" Division, and every morning before dawn the men of that regiment were roused from their canvas tents and marched onto the field in the pre-morning grey, drilling and drilling again until their boots were worn and their bodies moved with the automatic precision that the Army required.
It was during one of these early morning drills in mid-July that Private J. Robert Conroy first noticed the dog.
He appeared at the edge of the field like something that had always been there and had simply never been seen before — a stocky, smooth-coated terrier mix, perhaps a year old, his coloring a bold pattern of dark brindle and white. His head was too large for his compact body in the way of puppies that have not quite finished growing, his ears folded forward at their tips, his dark eyes moving across the rows of drilling soldiers with an expression of alert, intelligent interest rather than the nervous uncertainty you would expect from a stray dog confronting a crowd.
He sat down at the edge of the field. He watched the drill. For the first three mornings he appeared only at the edge, keeping his distance, watching. He was clearly a stray — his ribs were slightly visible beneath his coat, and he had no collar — but he was not starving, and he was not fearful.
He simply observed. On the fourth morning, he walked onto the field. He moved between the rows of soldiers without hesitation, sniffing at bootlaces and trouser legs, tail moving in slow, confident arcs. He was not begging for food.
He was introducing himself, the way a confident dog introduces himself — as if the outcome of the social exchange was already settled in his favor and the only question was the formality of completion. Private Conroy was a twenty-five-year-old from Connecticut, the son of a factory worker, solidly built and practical in his habits. He was not the sort of man who openly expressed sentiment about animals.
But when the brindle terrier arrived at his feet on the fourth morning, looked up at him with those dark, steady eyes, and sat down, Conroy looked back for a long moment and then crouched. The dog placed one paw on Conroy's knee.
"All right," Conroy said quietly, so the men around him would not hear. "All right, then."
He brought the dog a piece of hardtack and bacon from the mess that evening. The dog ate with focused efficiency, cleaned the last crumbs with his tongue, and then followed Conroy back to his tent and lay down beside his cot as if the arrangement had been agreed upon weeks ago.
Conroy named him Stubby — for his short, stubby tail, which had either been cropped at birth or was simply a natural feature of his mixed breeding.
In the weeks that followed, Stubby became a permanent and entirely unauthorized fixture of the 102nd Infantry Regiment's training operations. He learned the drill commands by observation — sitting when the men fell into formation, rising when they marched, and even appearing to stand at something resembling attention during officer inspections, which earned him a complicated mixture of exasperation and amusement from the regiment's officers.
Then came the event that changed everything. The regiment had been drilling the military salute one morning — right hand raised to the brow, precise angle, held until the officer passed. Stubby watched from beside Conroy's boot, his head cocked slightly.
Then he raised his right paw. He held it against the side of his head — not precisely at the brow, but close enough that the men around him broke formation entirely, laughter rippling down the line. The commanding officer who was walking the inspection, General John Pershing's aide Colonel Hiram Bearss, stopped in front of the dog and looked down at him.
Stubby held the raised-paw salute. Bearss saluted back.
"Get that dog a uniform," he said, which was as close to an official endorsement as an unauthorized regimental mascot was likely to receive.
By the time the 102nd Infantry Regiment received its orders to ship out to France in September 1917, Stubby was known by every man in the regiment, had a rough canvas jacket made by the regimental seamstress, and had been fed, petted, and informally adopted by approximately four hundred soldiers. He was still Private Conroy's dog. But he was the regiment's mascot.
And Private Conroy had no intention of leaving him behind.