![]() ![]() Regarding this, the usually unflappable Napoleon said, “This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment, yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog… I had looked on, unmoved, at battles that decided the future of nations. There were other similar stories from American and European wars, including one story from the Napoleonic Wars of a dog tugging Napoleon himself toward his owner’s corpse. When Pfeiff’s widow came to the battlefield in search of her husband’s body and, after a day of fruitless searching, began to despair of ever finding him amongst the more than 23,000 corpses, she was approached by the loyal dog, who brought her right to where Pfeiff was buried. Pfeiff’s dog, who sat at his owner’s shallow grave for 12 days after the Battle of Shiloh. In the Civil War there was the mascot known only as Lt. There had been other famous war dog mascots before Stubby. And while I’d been aiming more for the dog version of Terminator, I’d ended up with something closer to the canine version of Bill Murray in Stripes. Considered to be the first famous American war dog, Stubby was a stray mutt – generally assumed to be a pit bull terrier-who would end up serving by his eventual owner’s side in the trenches of World War I. My search for the model war dog finally led me to the surprisingly amicable Sergeant Stubby, the subject of a recently published book by Sunday Times writer Isabel George. And when I searched for “Alexander” and “dog,” I only found the combative philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, referred to as Diogenes the Dog, who slept in a tub in the Athenian marketplace and when asked by Alexander what he, the great emperor, could do for him, responded, “You can get out of my sunlight.” (As a result of his impudence, he became the only person Alexander said he would want to be other than himself.) While Romans did make use of dogs in war, Caesar himself didn’t seem to be associated with any particular dog and only made admiring mention of the English mastiffs in Britain that would run onto the battlefield clad in armor bearing torches and blades meant to terrorize the Roman horses. By the time my search finally wended its way back to the dogs of war for this article, the flood of bloodthirsty Caesarean and Alexandrian hellhounds that I’d anticipated never materialized. Once I began writing the column, for whatever reason, the historical dogs I began to write about became far less martial. I had a notion-admittedly foggy-that in researching the topic I would find no end of great military leaders, history’s Caesars and Alexanders, marching into battle surrounded by spike-helmeted demon dogs, growling, teeth gnashing, hungry for the throats of the cowering enemy. The score by Patrick Doyle ( Rise of the Planet of the Apes) also hits the right emotional notes in the right places, especially during a closing sequence where the legend of Stubby finally becomes fact.Exactly a year ago last August, when I first conceived this entire dog history column-while sitting in a dusty Glendale strip mall waiting to get a cheap haircut from an Armenian barber with no English and reading in my Twitter stream that McSweeney’s was having their annual column contest-my thoughts about which dogs would be possible subjects gravitated immediately toward war. Animation, which was handled by Technicolor and Mikros Animation in Canada, convincingly pushes the realism factor, with the battle scenes and European backdrops extremely well-rendered. Indeed, Stubby hardly shies away from the tough realities of what was known as the War to End All Wars, and it feels both proficiently documented and generally credible, even if it’s hard to believe that a dog did everything you see happening on screen. ![]()
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