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Chandigarh: Amid the usual torrent of recycled anecdotes, dubious quotations and mangled history was a brief video clip about the “mercy dogs” of World War I – animals supposedly trained to search battlefields for wounded soldiers. The claim sounded exaggerated, yet intriguing enough to warrant further investigation, and online research soon revealed that these dogs had indeed existed – and that their story constituted one of the most remarkable, moving and now largely forgotten chapters of the Great War.

It was across the battlefields of the Western Front – the principal theatre of the war between Germany and the Allied Powers in Western Europe – that these specially trained and amazingly resourceful animals had, indeed carried out their work of finding and rescuing the wounded.

Stretching for nearly 500 miles from the North Sea coast of Belgium through northern France to the Swiss frontier, the Front was a shattered landscape of mud-filled trenches, shell craters, splintered forests and tangled barbed wire. Here, the entrenched positions of the Imperial German Army faced those of the British, French and other Allied forces – later joined by American troops in 1917 – with the infamous No Man’s Land lying between them: a strip of devastated ground littered with wreckage, corpses, tangled wire and water-filled shell holes, where wounded soldiers could remain trapped for hours or even days.

A four-legged reassurance

It was across this forbidding terrain that these specially trained mercy dogs, principally German Shepherds or Alsatians, Airedales, Dobermans and other hardy working breeds, roamed in search of casualties, whom human rescuers could neither locate nor safely reach. For thousands of soldiers from both sides lying wounded and stranded across these desolate killing grounds, the appearance of one of these animals was often the first sign that rescue – and survival – remained possible, a four-legged reassurance that someone still knew they were alive.

Wearing Red Cross insignia and often carrying small packs containing bandages, water, morphine or other basic medical supplies, these dogs searched for wounded soldiers lying helplessly in shell craters, tangled wire, bushes and water-filled depressions. Human search parties frequently missed such casualties, particularly at night or under enemy fire, but these dogs relying on scent, rather than sight, were often able to successfully detect them.

Their training was remarkably sophisticated. They learned to search large areas independently, ignore gunfire and explosions, distinguish between the living and the dead and remain calm amid battlefield chaos. Crucially, they were conditioned not to bark, which could attract enemy fire and once a casualty had been located, they either returned to report the discovery or led rescuers directly to the wounded soldier.

The more usual procedure was for the animal to remain with the wounded man, allowing him to use the food, water or medical supplies carried in its pack. If he was too badly wounded to help himself, the dog would return to its handler carrying a piece of uniform, helmet or another identifying object, thereby guiding rescuers back to him. Contemporary descriptions also reveal some dogs guiding wounded........

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