No Man's Land between the opposing trench lines had no reliable geography after dark. The shell craters that defined the terrain shifted constantly — new impacts collapsed old crater edges and created new ones, turning the entire zone into a landscape that was never quite the same shape it had been on a previous patrol.
The barbed wire was strung in overlapping fields that had been cut and re-strung so many times by both sides that it formed dense, irregular tangles rather than the clean defensive barriers it had been in the early years of the war.
And at night, with no moon, visibility extended perhaps ten feet in any direction before the darkness closed in completely. Patrols went out into No Man's Land for reconnaissance, to cut wire, to locate enemy positions, and — most urgently — to find and recover wounded men who had been left in the open during raids or assault actions.
A wounded soldier who could not move and could not call out loudly enough to be heard was at the mercy of temperature, blood loss, and time. Stretcher parties went out as quickly as conditions allowed, but conditions frequently did not allow quickly, and the interval between a man going down and a stretcher party reaching him could be the difference between recovery and death.
Stubby began going out on patrols in late March 1918. It was not organized. It was not assigned.
It was the natural extension of what he had already been doing — moving through the trench at night, checking, knowing. When the first patrol went over the parapet and into the dark, Stubby went with them, and when no one stopped him, he went again.
He was useful on patrol in a way that was not immediately obvious but became very clear very quickly. A dog moving through broken terrain at night is quieter than a man — lower to the ground, lighter-footed on unstable surfaces, less likely to clip barbed wire in the dark.
More importantly, his nose was working constantly in a way that no human could replicate, reading the air in a continuous sweep that covered far more information than human sight could gather in the same dark. He could smell living men. He could smell blood.
He could smell the difference between fresh shell impact and old explosion residue, information that told him where the recent incoming fire had fallen. He moved through the craters with a systematic quality that the patrol soldiers began to recognize — not random nosing and wandering, but a directed search pattern, moving across wind to sweep the air ahead.
On the night of April 26th, a trench raid by German forces had left three American soldiers unaccounted for when the regiment counted heads at first light. The immediate assumption was that they had been killed in the open and not recovered, or taken prisoner.
A daylight recovery attempt was impossible — the ground was under German observation. Stubby went out the following night with a four-man patrol. He found the first man within forty minutes — a Private named Matthews, who had taken a fragment wound in the leg and had crawled into a shell crater where he had been unable to move for the past twenty hours.
He was severely dehydrated and had lost significant blood, but he was alive. Stubby found him by smell at a distance of approximately sixty yards, moved directly to his position, and barked twice — a specific, controlled alert bark rather than the continuous alarm bark he used for approaching raiders. The patrol followed the sound, reached Matthews, and got him back over the parapet.
The second man, Corporal Harrigan, was found thirty minutes later in a different crater four hundred yards along the line, alive but delirious from blood loss and cold exposure. Stubby located him by the low, intermittent sound of his voice — Harrigan had been calling out periodically through the night in a weakened murmur, not loud enough to carry to the trench but loud enough for Stubby's hearing to catch it at close range.
Stubby moved toward the sound, stopped at the crater edge, and again gave the controlled alert. The third man was not recovered that night. He had been taken prisoner.
But two men who had been given up for dead were brought back alive from No Man's Land because a brindle terrier had gone out into the dark and found them by nose and ear. The patrol soldiers wrote about it in their letters home — letters that were censored before mailing, so the specific details were often reduced to vague references to the dog finding missing men.
But the story traveled through the regiment in the unedited, word-of-mouth version, and it spread from regiment to division to the broader American Expeditionary Forces.
Stubby's reputation was becoming something larger than a regimental mascot.