The armistice ending World War I was signed at eleven AM on November 11th, 1918. The guns on the Western Front had been firing continuously for four years, two months, and seventeen days. When eleven o'clock came, they stopped.
The silence that followed was something that soldiers who survived the war struggled to describe for the rest of their lives — not peace exactly, because peace is an absence of something bad, and this was something more than an absence. It was the return of a world without artillery. Many men simply sat down where they were and stayed there for a while.
Stubby was with Conroy when the armistice came into effect. He had spent the preceding forty-eight hours in a rear billet with the rest of the regiment as the final diplomatic machinery ran its course. When the guns stopped, he raised his broad head, his ears angling toward the sudden quiet, reading the new and unfamiliar silence with the focused attention he gave to everything.
Then he lay down with his head on his front paws and closed his eyes. The 102nd Infantry Regiment returned to the United States in the spring of 1919, sailing back across the Atlantic through waters that no longer required convoy escorts and listening for submarines.
Conroy brought Stubby home in the same practical fashion he had brought him to France — not hidden this time, but walked openly up the gangplank on a lead, wearing his chamois leather coat and his medals, recognized by the ship's crew before the regiment had finished boarding.
The welcome they received in New York and Washington D.C. was substantial.
In Washington, a parade was organized for the returning 26th Yankee Division, and the division marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to an enormous crowd. Sergeant Stubby was placed at the front of the regiment's column, walking with Conroy, and the crowd responded to him with the kind of recognition that had been building since the wire service stories about the regimental dog of the 102nd had begun running in American newspapers during the final months of the war.
He was received at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, who shook Conroy's hand and then looked down at Stubby for a moment. Stubby raised his right paw.
Wilson, who was sixty-two years old and had spent four years managing the United States' participation in the most destructive war in human history, shook the paw with the care and gravity of a man who understood when something deserved to be taken seriously.
In the years that followed, Stubby became the most recognized military dog in American history. He was received by Presidents Harding and Coolidge as well — three sitting presidents, three salutes, three handshakes, the same steady amber-brown eyes each time.
He was given life membership to the American Red Cross, the YMCA, and the American Legion. He attended dozens of veterans' events and reunions, where the men of the 102nd Infantry greeted him with a warmth that did not diminish with the years.
Conroy enrolled at Georgetown University Law School and brought Stubby to campus, where the dog became the unofficial mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas football team and attended practice sessions on the field with the same interested attention he had shown at the Yale Bowl in the summer of 1917. Stubby died peacefully in Conroy's arms on March 16th, 1926.
He was approximately ten years old. Conroy, who had become a lawyer and would go on to a distinguished career, held him until it was over.
His body was preserved and displayed at the Red Cross Museum in Washington D. C.
through the following decades, before being transferred to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, where he remains on permanent display to this day — his chamois leather coat with its medals still attached, the coin medallion from Madame Chevanne still at the front, his compact brindle-and-white form posed in the same forward-facing, alert stance he had carried through the Yale Bowl, across the Atlantic, and along the length of the Western Front.
He had been a stray dog in New Haven, Connecticut when he walked onto a training field in July 1917 and decided, with the uncomplicated confidence of a dog who trusts himself, that the men drilling there were his. He spent the rest of his life proving that he was right.
Stubby lay beside the still form in the forward trench, his warm body pressed against the young soldier's side. His breathing was steady and deep, a small anchor against the chaos of the front line.