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.

He trotted past a sentry, into an unroofed cattle-shed where the colonel was busily scribbling a detailed report of the work done by the “Here-We-Comes” during that day’s drive.