"Croquier!"

"But yes, my boy, it is I!"

The boy ran forward eagerly to greet his old friend, for the moment ignoring the dogs by which he was surrounded, and then stopped and looked fixedly at his comrade.

"Your arm?" he queried.

The hunchback shrugged one shoulder.

"It is gone, as you see," he answered.

"But how?"

"It was my fate, no doubt," the other responded. "Destiny had decided that I should give an arm to the Germans; so, since the military authorities would not give me the opportunity to lose it at the front, I left it behind me in Paris."

"What happened?" Horace persisted.

"It was a little nothing," the hunchback replied. "A German bird dropped a shell out of his beak on the munitions factory where I was working."

[Pg 335]

"And a splinter hit you?"

"Several."

"Why didn't you dodge?"

"I couldn't. You see," the hunchback continued, "there was a girl there."

"And then?" demanded the lad impatiently. "Don't stammer so, Croquier, tell the story!"

"It was a tiny nothing," his comrade repeated, somewhat shamefacedly. "It was this way. In the factory where I was working, there were many brave girls working also, brave girls, for the work was dangerous. It was especially dangerous, because there was a church on one side and a hospital near by. A Boche aviator always tries to hit a hospital when he can. The Red Cross to him is as it would be to a bull."

"I've noticed that," the boy agreed. "At the front, here, they shell the field hospitals every chance they get. But tell the story!"

"One foggy morning, then," the hunchback went on, "about a week before Christmas, an aviator who had escaped our air-sentries by reason of the mist, let fall a bomb. I feel sure it was meant for the hospital, but it hit us instead. I was working on the top floor. The bomb—it was quite a little one—came through the roof. I happened to[Pg 336] be the one to see it coming and I saw, at once, that it would fall on the stone bench in front of which the girls were working.

"It was not the time for politeness, you understand, so I swept my left arm round, and the girl who was working next to me fell down flat.

"I must have been a little slow in bringing down my arm after I had swung it round, for the shell struck the bench at the same second and the splinters collected in my hand and wrist. The hand was almost quite cut off. The doctors said it was a lovely amputation—they are droll fellows, those doctors—but to make the matter more sure, they cut off my arm a little higher, as you see. It was to prevent infection, they said."

"And the girl?"

The hunchback looked grave.

"She was black and blue for a week," he said. "You see, I am rather strong and perhaps I hit her a little too hard."

"But you saved her life!"

"That, of course," said the Frenchman, simply; "what else would any one do?"

"And were you the only one hurt?"

"Alas, no!" sighed Croquier. "It is there that I was a fool. If I had hit two girls, one on either[Pg 337] side, it would have been very good. But I had a sharp tool in my right hand and I did not think of it. The brave little one on that side was killed. No one else was hurt. It was a wonderful escape."

"I don't quite see it that way," the boy retorted. "One girl killed and one man crippled, by a small a?roplane bomb, looks to me more like a catastrophe than an escape. What happened to the girl whose life you saved?"

"She was as kind as she was brave," the hunchback answered. "She was very rich, or, rather, she had been so before the war, though she had put on workmen's clothes and was slaving in a munitions factory. She was doing it for France.

"Every day that I was in the hospital she came to see me after working hours. So did other of the operatives. They were all very kind, but she was the kindest. It was she who secured permission for me to have the 'captive Kaiser' on the little table beside my hospital bed. The doctors could refuse her nothing. She had a smile, ah! one to remember!"

Horace smiled at the mental picture of the grim, black eagle with the yellow eyes, iron-caged, in[Pg 338] the white, cool cleanliness of a hospital ward.

"It was Mademoiselle Chandon, too," Croquier continued, "who enabled me to come here to the front. I am a general, no less, my boy, now. I am the General of this army of dogs."

"So I see," the lad agreed. "But I didn't know that you knew anything about dogs."

"Have you forgotten, my boy," the hunchback answered, "that, when I was a small urchin, I traveled with the circus? I am sure I have told you stories of that time. My master was the animal trainer and many were the tricks that he taught me. One does not forget what one has learned in childhood.

"Mademoiselle Chandon, she whose pretty face I was so fortunate as to save with my arm, formerly was rich, as I have said. Before the war, her father had owned magnificent kennels and he was forever lamenting that he could not give his dogs to the army. But they were not trained.

"'But I, Mademoiselle,' I said to her, 'behold, I can train dogs. That does not take two hands!'

"She clapped her little palms together with delight and ran away to her big house in the town, which was being used as a hospital for the blind.

"It was, perhaps, about a week after that, that[Pg 339] the old nobleman, her grandfather, came to see me in the hospital. It must needs be her grandfather who came. Her father was an officer in the Cuirassiers. The family had given all their automobiles to the army for staff purposes, so the old nobleman came himself through the streets on foot.

Courtesy of "La Grande Guerre."

Machine-Gun Dog-Team In Belgium.

Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."

Each Kennel Inhabited By One Wise, Silent Dog.

Note that these kennels are drilled out of solid rock as a protection against dropping shells.

"'So, my fine fellow,' he said to me, 'after saving my daughter's life, you want to train my dogs so that they may get crippled, eh?'

"'That is as Monsieur le Comte wishes,' I made reply.

"'I shall give myself the pleasure of taking you to the country with me when I go, next week,' he said.

"Ah, it is the old families who understand true courtesy!

"He had nearly a hundred dogs. They were a little too much inbred, perhaps, and therefore over-nervous, but good dogs. Monsieur le Comte gave me the gardener's cottage to live in—the gardener is in the trenches at Verdun—and I spent two happy months teaching the dogs."

"That's why my letters never reached you, then," said Horace. "I always wrote to our old address."

[Pg 340]

"I think the landlady died when I was in the hospital," answered Croquier. "She fell ill soon after you left. And, you remember, she was very old."

"She was old," the boy agreed. "But why didn't you ever write to me?"

"I did, many times. Naturally, I wrote to the Motorcycle Corps of the Fourth Army, but I never received a response."

"Of course," said the boy thoughtfully, "that wouldn't reach me. My old motor-cycle has been idle for several months. When I found that there wasn't any more dispatch work to do, I took a military telephone course at the camp school."

"So you're a telephonist, now!"

"And you're a dog general!"

"I have some beauties, too!" Croquier looked around at the little rock-cut kennels with manifest pride. "They're so clever that I'm afraid, some morning, I'll come out and find them all talking."

"What do you teach them to do?" asked Horace, smiling at the exaggeration.

"I train them into three different lines of work," the hunchback answered. "One set is taught to serve on listening-posts and to assist on sentry duty, another group is trained to carry[Pg 341] messages, and the third group is taught to hunt for the wounded when a battle has been raging over a large space of ground."

"What does a dog do at a listening-post?" Horace asked. "Does he bark when he hears something?"

"Not a bark, not a sound!" the hunchback answered. "I teach them to bite a man's ankles gently, so!" He bent down and with his strong fingers nipped Horace just above the heel. "Then the sentry knows that there is an alarm, for a dog's hearing is much keener than a man's. If the sentry is lying down, I teach the dog to pay no attention to him but to run to the sentry at the next listening-post. Then the second sentry knows that there is an alarm, and also that the man at the next post is either dead or wounded. From that listening-post a message is sent back, sometimes by telephone, sometimes by messenger, sometimes by message or liaison dog. Star shells are meantime shot up to illumine that particular bit of trench, and the machine guns spray death there."

"And the message dogs, how do you work them?" the boy asked.

"The dogs of liaison are used on advanced post[Pg 342] work, or in saps, or when tunneling is done for a mine. Sometimes it is necessary to send back for re?nforcements and a man cannot be spared. Then a message is attached to a dog's neck and he is told to go. He gallops back to the headquarters which is his home for the time being and the man in charge takes the message and gives him a feed. The dogs are kept hungry and they know that whenever they take a message they will get a good dinner. I tell you, my boy, they do not stop to play along the road!"

"And the Red Cross dogs?"

"I have only a few of those," the hunchback answered, "chiefly Belgian dogs, because the Red Cross is using a great many dogs from Mount St. Bernard, dogs which have already been taught by the monks to find travelers lost in the snow.

"Then I have ratting terriers, a few rough-coated fox terriers, which have a natural instinct for fighting rats, and a number of Irish terriers which have to be trained to the work. When properly taught, they are much the better."

"I don't see why," the boy objected; "I should think that dogs which didn't have to be trained would be keener after the rats."

"So they are," the trainer replied, "if we were[Pg 343] dealing with ordinary rats. But the savage rats which have developed in the trenches, creatures which are sometimes ferocious enough to kill and devour the severely wounded, are sometimes more than the snappy little fox-terriers can manage. Some of those rats have a body eight inches long from snout to root of tail and weigh over a pound. The hard wiry coat and tough skin of the Irish terrier is a good protection against the terrible down-slashing stroke of a rat's teeth. Besides which, the Irish terrier is a much more determined fighter, when aroused, and his square jaw is far more powerful than that of his black-and-white cousin."

Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."

Message Dog Wearing Gas Mask.

In order to escape poison fumes, dogs of the liaison have to be trained to wear masks, like soldiers.

"Why not use ferrets to drive the rats out the trenches, just as they do to drive them out of granaries and warehouses in the city?"

"Too unsafe," the hunchback answered. "We can't spare men enough to send them rat-hunting with ferrets, and if we simply turned the ferrets loose, they might multiply so fast that they would kill off all the rats and then become a tenfold worse danger. A ferret is twice as long as a rat and is the most murderous creature that draws the breath of life. A plague of ferrets would be fearful. They would be worse than poison gas,[Pg 344] which is the thing that troubles me most in the kennels here."

"Why here?" asked the boy in surprise, "you're far enough in the rear to escape poison gas, surely?"

"Yes, but my dogs have to work at the front," the hunchback explained, "and they need protection, just as much as the men in the fire trench. The dogs have to become accustomed to wearing gas-masks, just like soldiers. It's hard on the dogs, too, because a dog doesn't breathe much through his nose when he's running but through his mouth and so the mask has to be made in a different way.

"You'd never believe the amount of trouble I have in trying to teach my dogs to keep from scratching the gas-masks off with their paws. I've got some little puppies that I keep in gas-masks all the time. I only take their alkali-soaked bonnets off at their breakfast and dinner time. They even sleep in them."

"Poor little beggars!" exclaimed Horace, "and they haven't even got the satisfaction of realizing why they have to do it."

"Well," said the hunchback, gravely, "I always tell them 'It's for France!' Because," he added,[Pg 345] half-seriously, "one can never tell how much a dog understands."

Horace spent the whole of his day off duty with his old friend and returned that evening to his telephone station, full of stories of the hunchback's wonderful dogs. With great gusto he recounted to his friend the veteran the story of the canine gas-masks.

"Luckily, as yet we haven't needed them here," the sergeant-major answered, "though I suppose we may expect gas at any time. It's a dirty, sneaking way of making war, I think! The Boches only started that against the British because they hate them so. You know their 'Chant of Hate':

"'You we hate with a lasting hate, We will never forego our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe and one alone, England!' When you hate anybody as much as that, I suppose, even poison gas seems justified."

"One hardly realizes," said Horace, thoughtfully, "that any nation could work up such a hate."

"Germany is worse poisoned by her hate than[Pg 346] any one of our poor asphyxiated soldiers is poisoned by their chlorine gas. Yet it's a terrible thing to be gassed. I saw some of its victims on that sector to which I was transferred for a while, this spring. A gassed man is made blind and dumb; sometimes the sight returns, and sometimes it does not. The tongue is swollen to nearly double its normal size, ulcerated and blotched with black patches. The lungs are attacked so badly that quite often the blood vessels burst and the man chokes to death with bubbling frothy blood. The arms and legs turn a mottled violet color. The pulse is no more than a faint flutter. Even those who recover have their health so badly wrecked that they can never march or work again. To lift the hands over the head a few times drives a gassed man into a violent perspiration, and to walk upstairs produces exhaustion, while others, for the rest of their lives, will never be able to eat a solid meal."

"But did that poison gas do the Germans any good?" the boy asked. "Did it achieve any military gain?"

"Yes," the veteran admitted, "it did. It almost won them the war. If they had known as much about poison gas when they started it as[Pg 347] they do now, they would have gobbled up the little piece of Belgium which they have never been able to win and thus secured a hold on the English Channel coast."

"What stopped them?"

"Two things," the veteran replied, "the valor of the Canadians and the fact that the poison gas system which they used at the beginning was fixed and not mobile. When the fiendish fumes were first directed against fighting troops, they were projected from fixed gasometers, and the pipes leading from them were permanent and solidly made, so that they would not leak gas into their own trenches. That meant that the fumes could only be wafted from the one fixed point."

"When was it first used?"

"On April 22," the veteran answered.[20] "It was the Duke of Würtemberg's army which had the foul dishonor of being the first to employ the evil thing. About five o'clock in the evening, from the base of the German trenches and over a considerable stretch of the line, there appeared vague jets of whitish mist. Like the vapors from a witch's caldron they gathered and swirled until[Pg 348] they settled into a definite low-hanging cloud-bank, greenish-brown below and yellow above, where it reflected the rays of the sinking sun. This ominous bank of vapor, impelled by a northeastern breeze, drifted slowly across the space which separated the two lines, just at the point where the British and French commands joined hands. The southernly drift of the wind drove it down the line.

"The French troops, staring over the top of their parapet at this curious cloud, which, for the time being, ensured them a temporary relief from the continuous bombardment, were observed suddenly to throw up their hands, to clutch at their throats and to fall to the ground in the agonies of asphyxiation.

"Many lay where they had fallen, while their comrades, absolutely helpless against this diabolical agency, rushed madly out of the mephitic mist and made for the rear, overrunning the lines of trenches behind them. Some never halted until they had reached Ypres, while others rushed westwards and put the canal between themselves and the enemy.

"The Germans, meanwhile, advanced, and took possession of the successive lines of trenches, tenanted[Pg 349] only by dead garrisons, whose blackened faces, contorted figures and lips fringed with blood and foam from their bursting lungs, showed the agonies in which they had died. Some thousands of stupefied prisoners, eight batteries of 75's and four British batteries were the trophies won by this disgraceful victory.

Courtesy of "The Graphic."

The Zouave Bugler's Last Call.

"... he tore off his protecting mask, sent his anguished appeal to his comrades in the rear, and then lurched forward to die an agonizing death."

"It was especially terrifying to the Africans. They were ready for any form of fighting, but brigades such as the Moroccans, born and brought up under a vivid primitive fear of sorcery, were—for the first time in their history—driven into panic. They were willing to charge against men, no matter what the odds, but not against magic, and our officers had great difficulty in rallying them, even two or three days afterwards. When, however, the Algerian and Moroccan troops became convinced that it was the work of men and not of afrits or djinns, they had but one desire—revenge.

"Yet the Germans gained far less by this advantage than they should have done, for they wasted their time in consolidating the trenches they had won. A marvelous opening was before them, but for lack of personal dash, their best opportunity passed away forever. 'They sold[Pg 350] their souls as soldiers,' as one of the English writers, Sir Conan Doyle, expressed it, 'but the Devil's price was a poor one. Had the Germans had a corps of cavalry ready and passed them through the gap, it would have been the most dangerous moment of the war.'"

"'They sold their souls as soldiers, but the Devil's price was a poor one.' That's a good phrase," repeated Horace, "I'll remember it."

"It was really the most dangerous moment of the war," the veteran continued, "for it was the only time in the war that the Germans actually broke through. They had not broken through in Belgium. They had not broken through—save for advance cavalry—at Charleroi. They had not broken through on the British left in the retreat from Mons, though it was a near shave. They had not broken through at Foch's right in the Battle of the Marne, though in a few hours more they must have done so. But they broke through at Ypres. The initial poison gas attack pierced the Allied lines for the first time.

"Then the hidebound German strategy, which wins a few battles for them and loses twice as many more, became their ruin. Finding themselves on the farther side of the line, it seemed a[Pg 351] supreme opportunity to adopt flanking tactics. The Canadians—whom the Germans hated equally with the Australians and twice as much as the English, if that were possible—held the line to the north of the sector which had been pierced by the aid of poison gas. The Germans hungrily turned on the Canadians to encircle and crumple them up.

"They soon found that they had clutched a spiny thistle in bare hands.

"From three sides they advanced upon the Canadians, ranging their artillery in a devastating cross-fire. Not a man in the Canadian regiments expected to survive. Few did. In the teeth of every conceivable projectile, Canadian re?nforcements came up to dare and die. Again the Germans, having recharged their reservoirs, opened their poison gas valves. But the direction of the attack was different and the wind blew the fumes away. The Germans, though in gas-masks (worn for the first time that day), were not sufficiently protected and hundreds died from their own infernal device. The gas was shut off. In the night the wind changed and on Friday morning another discharge of gas was sent against the Canadian lines.

[Pg 352]

"The Canadian Highlanders received that discharge, and, though they showed themselves to be among the most gallant soldiers who ever fought like heroes in a righteous cause, they were compelled to fall back. Yet, even so, the Teutons did not break the line. On every side, the German forces poured in. They threw army corps after army corps into the gap. At one time, there were fourteen Germans against one Canadian, and the artillery concentration was as sixty shells to one.

"Yet the men held firm, knowing, that hour by hour, even minute by minute, the gap behind them was being closed by re?nforcements. They died, and died willingly, to save the day. Neither poison gas—remember, they had no masks, for the gas was a surprise only of the night before—artillery, nor overwhelming odds could break the line. The officers ran to the foremost places in the trenches and died, fighting, with the men. Every Canadian reserve was hurled into the breach, to charge and counter-attack for a few minutes before they died, that others, following, also might hold the foe for a few moments, and then die.

"By the middle of Friday morning, British re?nforcing[Pg 353] brigades had come up. They reached the Canadian lines.

"The British halted, sent up a cheer for Canada, for a heroic fight seldom equaled in the annals of war, a fight which has given Canada a glory equal to the splendor of Belgium at Liége, of France at the Marne and of ............