The ceremony was not large by military standards. It took place on a dry afternoon in October 1918, in a farmyard behind the lines that the regiment was using as a rear billet. The men of the 102nd Infantry assembled in their ranks, boots cleaned as well as the mud of northern France permitted, uniforms pressed where pressing was possible.
Folding chairs had been set up for the senior officers. A table had been placed at the front with a cloth over it.
Stubby stood in the front rank beside Private Conroy, wearing his canvas regimental jacket, which was clean and had been repaired that morning by the regimental seamstress, a French woman named Madame Chevanne who had taken Stubby under her personal care during the regiment's last billet period and had fed him an extraordinary quantity of bread and cheese in exchange for his company.
The commanding officer, Colonel John Henry Parker, stood before the assembled regiment and read from a prepared order. The document cited three specific actions: The first was the gas detection and early warning function that Stubby had performed repeatedly throughout the regiment's service on the Western Front, with specific citation of the April 13th incident in which he had personally roused sleeping soldiers from a dugout ahead of a mustard gas attack.
The second was the search and recovery function in No Man's Land, with specific citation of the recovery of Private Matthews and Corporal Harrigan on the night of April 26th. The third was the capture of the German intelligence operative in the Seicheprey sector in September, which had been documented in Colonel Hines's after-action report and verified through the divisional intelligence process.
Colonel Parker paused after reading the three citations.
"No regulation in the United States Army provides for the promotion of a dog," he said. "However, no regulation in the United States Army prohibits it either."
A sound went through the assembled regiment — not quite a laugh, not quite a cheer, somewhere in between, the particular sound of men who have been carrying something heavy for a long time and have been given, for a moment, permission to set it down. Colonel Parker addressed Stubby directly.
"Private Conroy tells me this dog can salute. I would like to see it."
Conroy looked down at Stubby. Stubby looked up at Conroy, then turned to Colonel Parker. He raised his right paw.
He held it, flat and steady, against the right side of his broad brindle head. Colonel Parker returned the salute with military precision.
"Sergeant Stubby," he said. "Congratulations on your promotion. You have earned it considerably more straightforwardly than most sergeants I have known."
The regiment responded with the kind of noise that regimental commanders generally prefer not to hear from a formation but make exceptions for on appropriate occasions. The chamois leather coat that had been commissioned for Stubby was brought forward from the table — a proper fitted jacket, cut and stitched to his exact measurements, with attachment points for the medals and service citations that had been accumulating on his canvas regimental jacket over the preceding months.
The medals were transferred with ceremony: the Purple Heart ribbon for the wounds Stubby had received during a trench raid in April, when a grenade fragment had grazed his left foreleg. The unit citation ribbons for the regiment's service at Seicheprey and the Saint-Mihiel Offensive. The Yankee Division YD patch sewn to the left shoulder.
Madame Chevanne, who had been given a place of honor at the ceremony, presented a small additional medallion she had made herself from a French coin, engraved on one side with the letters SGT. STUBBY 102ND INF. She attached it to the front of the leather coat and took a step back.
Stubby wore the coat with the particular unconsciousness of an animal who is comfortable with attention without needing it — present, alert, tail moving at an easy pace, looking at the assembled men with those dark, forward-focused eyes that had been looking at them steadily since the July morning in New Haven when he had walked onto the Yale Bowl training field and decided, with the confidence of a dog who trusts his own judgment about things, that these were his people.
He had been right.
The makeshift field hospital tent reeked of carbolic and iodine, but to Stubby these were the smells of safety — of human hands working to repair what the war had broken. He moved carefully between the cots, his compact body navigating the tight aisles with practiced confidence, offering what comfort his presence alone could provide to men who had seen too much.