The Red Cross appeal raised countless millions of dollars and brought
rescue to innumerable human warriors. But in caring for humans, the
generosity of most givers reached its limit; and the Blue Cross--"for
the relief of dogs and horses injured in the service of the
Allies"--was forced to take what it could get. Yet many a man, and many
a body of men, owed life and safety to the heroism of some war-dog, a
dog which surely merited special care when its own certain hour of
agony struck.
Bruce's warmest overseas friends were to be found in the ranks of the
mixed Franco-American regiment, nicknamed the "Here-We-Comes." Right
gallantly, in more than one tight place, had Bruce been of use to the
"Here-We-Comes." On his official visits to the regiment, he was always
received with a joyous welcome that would have turned any head less
steady than a thoroughbred collie's.
Bruce enjoyed this treatment. He enjoyed, too, the food-dainties
wherewith the "Here-We-Comes" plied him. But to no man in the army
would he give the adoring personal loyalty he had left at The Place
with the Mistress and the Master. Those two were still his only gods.
And he missed them and his sweet life at The Place most bitterly. Yet
he was too good a soldier to mope.
* * * * *
For months the "Here-We-Comes" had been quartered in a "quiet"--or only
occasionally tumultuous--sector, near Chateau-Thierry. Then the
comparative quiet all at once turned to pandemonium.
A lanky and degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly
known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned
in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some
half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had lately been merely
a salient.
From the three lower sides of the pocket, the Allies ecstatically flung
themselves upon their trapped foes in a laudable effort to crush the
half-million boches and their rabbit-faced princeling into surrender
before the latter could get out of the snare, and to the shelter of the
high ground and the reenforcements that lay behind it. The Germans
objected most strenuously to this crushing process. And the three
beleaguered edges of the pocket became a triple-section of hell.
It was a period when no one's nerves were in any degree normal--least
of all the nerves of the eternally hammered Germans. Even the fiercely
advancing Franco-Americans, the "Here-We-Comes," had lost the grimly
humorous composure that had been theirs, and waxed sullen and ferocious
in their eagerness.
Thus it was that Bruce missed his wontedly uproarious welcome as he
cantered, at sunset one July day, into a smashed farmstead where his
friends, the "Here-We-Comes," were bivouacked for the night. By
instinct, the big dog seemed to know where to find the temporary
regimental headquarters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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