The Seicheprey sector, late September 1918. The incident with the German spy began unremarkably, in the grey pre-dawn of a cool September morning when the front had been relatively quiet for forty-eight hours — quiet meaning no major raids, though the routine artillery exchange continued as it always did, a background percussion that the men had stopped consciously hearing.
Stubby had taken to running the perimeter of the regimental position in the mornings, moving along the rear communication trenches and the support positions in the hour after stand-to, when the men were standing down from the pre-dawn alert and the officers were conducting their morning check. It was a habit that had developed without instruction, and the men had come to regard it as normal.
On this particular morning, Stubby turned a corner in the rear communication trench near the observation point at the eastern end of the sector and encountered a man he did not recognize. This was not immediately alarming in itself — the regiment moved men in and out regularly, and Stubby encountered unfamiliar soldiers reasonably often. What triggered his attention was more specific than unfamiliarity.
The man was crouching low in the shadow of the trench wall, holding a small notebook and pencil, and his posture was the particular posture of someone who is trying very hard not to be in the place they are in — compressing himself against the wall, moving minimally, listening. He was also dressed in American uniform.
But something about him was wrong to Stubby in a way that worked below the level of visual detail — the smell was wrong.
Not the smell of the regiment's soap, their rations, their equipment, the particular combination of sweat and wool and gun oil and tobacco that defined the scent signature of the men Stubby lived among. Something different underneath it. Stubby charged.
He covered the distance between the trench corner and the crouching man in approximately two seconds — fast enough that the man had no time to do more than turn toward the sound before Stubby hit him in the legs and drove him backward into the trench wall. He did not bite — not his characteristic alerting bite to a boot, and not a defensive bite.
He drove his weight into the man's shins, backed off, lunged again when the man tried to push forward, and when the man turned to run, latched onto the back of his trouser leg with a grip that thirty pounds of compact terrier muscle made very difficult to break.
He held on. He was still holding on, and the man was still trying to get free, when Private Conroy and two other soldiers came around the trench corner at a run, drawn by the noise. The man had a German military identification document in his breast pocket, a detailed sketch of the American trench layout in his notebook, and a compass oriented to German lines.
He had apparently been mapping the 102nd's position for a German command post, dressed in a captured American uniform, and had been working his way through the rear communication trenches in the pre-dawn quiet. He had not anticipated the dog.
Stubby was pulled off the man's trouser leg only after Conroy had him secured by both arms. The terrier sat back, shook himself, and stood watching while the prisoner was searched and his materials confiscated, with the same alert, forward-focused expression he wore during drills.
The prisoner was transferred to divisional intelligence for interrogation. The regimental commanding officer, Colonel John Hines, wrote in his report that the capture had prevented the transmission of detailed trench layout intelligence that could have been used to target a subsequent German raid. He formally credited Stubby with the capture.
It was the third category of service in which a thirty-pound terrier had materially contributed to the operational effectiveness of an infantry regiment at war. He had provided early gas warning. He had located wounded men in No Man's Land. He had captured an enemy intelligence operative.
No other dog in the American Expeditionary Forces had done any one of those three things, let alone all three. The letter recommending formal recognition of Stubby's service was drafted that afternoon.
Stubby pressed against Corporal Robert's leg in the darkness of the shell crater, his entire body coiled with alert tension as his extraordinary nose read the night air. The thick mud of the Western Front held a hundred chemical signatures layered one over the other, but Stubby had learned to sort them with the precision of a trained analyst. Something was different tonight.