It was mainly owing to a number of British dogs that the French army was able to drive the Germans out of Boesinghe Woods in one of the engagements round Ypres. Prusco, a bull-terrier, serving with French motor scouts, who carried him in a side-car, was of great value in carrying messages back to headquarters; while Lutz, a dog that distinguished himself in one of the Verdun engagements, was employed as an advance sentinel last February, and first gave warning of a German attack by repeated growls. The Red Cross Dog League, which began activities early in the war with eight dogs, now has two thousand five hundred animals in the field, and it claims that the lives of at least eight thousand wounded men have been saved by them.
The training of intelligent animals like these is carried on in five different ways, for various uses.
1.--_As Ambulance Dogs._ The animal seeks for wounded men lost on the battlefield; he searches in holes, ruins, and excavations, and hunts over wooded places or coverts, where the wounded man might lie unnoticed by his comrades or the stretcher-bearer. The dog is especially useful at this work in the night-time, when he can often by his scent discover fallen men who would otherwise be passed over, for at night-time ambulance-men often have to work in the dark, as lights would attract the enemy's fire. Having found a wounded man still alive, the dog brings his master (or the ambulance-man to whom he is attached) some article belonging to the sufferer. This object tells the master, "I have found someone--search!" Usually the object brought is the fallen man's _képi_ (or nowadays his helmet), and the trainers teach the dog to find the man's headgear, but if this is missing some other object must be brought. It is a fatiguing operation for the animal, as he has to return with closed mouth. The ambulance-man who receives the article at once puts the animal on a leash, and is immediately led to his wounded comrade. The leash is about two yards long, so that the movements of the animal shall be hindered as little as possible.
If dogs were utilized in this service long during wartime, their value would be incalculable; and their use is all the greater when fighting takes place over an extended area. The situation of the wounded man overlooked or abandoned on the battlefield is a truly horrible one; he has to wait in the forlorn hope that he will be found, for the army has gone on, and the more victorious it is the farther it will push ahead. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 more than twelve thousand men were thus lost to the French alone, while in the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese lost over five thousand in this manner, showing that the methods then used for the exploration of the battlefields were inadequate. In that war three dogs sent by a military dog society found twenty-three wounded men who had been abandoned after the battle of Cha-ho. In the Boer War the collie dogs taken out by the men, it is said, saved hundreds of wounded men who would never have been found by the ambulance-workers in the difficult country where fighting mostly took place.