Rin Tin Tin Read online

  Stories circulated of dogs that performed extraordinary feats. There was Prince, of the North Staffordshire Regiment, who walked two hundred miles from his home in Hammersmith, England, to find his master in a trench in Armentières, France; Sergeant-Major Mac, a mongrel who was able to distinguish between enemy and Allied aircraft by sound and served as an early-warning system for the 449th British Siege Battery; Crump, a Brussels griffon who was a pack-a-day smoker and accompanied a British general on active service until the Armistice. Stubby the Hero Dog, a moth-eaten stray, was the mascot of the U.S. Army’s 102nd Infantry and stood with the troops through seventeen major battles. After the war, Stubby shook hands with Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge; when he died he was stuffed and mounted and put in the Smithsonian on display.

  The first time most people in the world saw a German shepherd dog was in the war, and it caused an immediate sensation. A cavalry officer named Max Emil Friedrich von Stephanitz had developed the breed in Germany in 1899, just fifteen years before the war. Von Stephanitz was a German nobleman with a tentative-looking jaw and a bold black moustache, and a great interest in dogs. Just as he was about to be promoted in the army, he made the strategic mistake of marrying an actress. By the standards of priggish nineteenth-century Germany, a woman in theater was practically a prostitute; the scandal of his marriage forced von Stephanitz to resign his commission. He seemed to enjoy the fact that unemployment afforded him more time to spend at dog shows. At that point, there were many different shepherd-like breeds in Germany, but not a single standardized type. Von Stephanitz had a Germanic enthusiasm for genetics and had studied briefly at a veterinary college. He was convinced that if he carefully managed bloodlines he could establish a distinct and superior type of dog that could become the national breed of Germany. He preferred muscular dogs with erect ears rather than fuzzy dogs with floppy ears, and as he wrote in his book The German Shepherd Dog, he liked dogs that demonstrated “attentiveness, unshockability, tractability, watchfulness, reliability, and incorruptibility together with courage, fighting tenacity, and hardness.” This new breed, von Stephanitz imagined, would be a worker, good at managing flocks and guarding farms: smart, athletic, and loyal to the bone. Most important, it would have a unique capacity for bonding with human beings.

  In 1899, after months of searching throughout Germany, von Stephanitz found a dog that had the look and temperament he had in mind. The dog was named Hektor. According to von Stephanitz, he was “one live wire . . . his character was on a par with his exterior qualities . . . the straightforward nature of a gentleman with a boundless zest for living.” From the sound of it, Hektor was, to put it politely, an untrained creature. “When left to himself,” von Stephanitz admitted, “he is the maddest rascal, the wildest ruffian and incorrigible provoker of strife; never idle, always on the go; well disposed to harmless people, but no cringer, mad about children and always in love.”

  Von Stephanitz changed Hektor’s name to Horand and began breeding him with suitable mates, hoping to advance what he called his “grand design.” As soon as there was a sufficient number of Horand’s puppies that matched his standard for the breed, von Stephanitz founded the Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde—commonly known as simply SV, the German Shepherd Dog Club—and established benchmarks for the breed such as height, weight, color, bone structure, and coat.

  Von Stephanitz’s new breed proved popular; Horand’s puppies were snapped up and the club grew quickly. Von Stephanitz maintained strict control, insisting on approving which dogs were mated, having all new litters of German shepherds inspected by the club’s “breed wardens,” and even deciding how many puppies a breeder could keep of any new litters. The American Kennel Club first recognized German shepherd dogs as a breed in 1908 and registered a female named Queen of Switzerland that year. For years, German shepherds were rare and expensive in the United States: a male German shepherd at the 1913 Westminster Kennel Club show sold for $10,000, the equivalent of $215,000 today. In Germany, though, there were enough dogs that met von Stephanitz’s breed standards by 1914 that he approached the German high command and suggested adopting German shepherds as the country’s official army dog.

  Dogs were already highly valued by the German military; they were classified by the army as “important auxiliaries.” The New York Times reported that the first military dog training school, opened in Berlin in 1884, had made “wonderful progress” in preparing animals to assist on the battlefield. Most of the dogs used in the German army were a ragtag assortment of shepherd types. Von Stephanitz dreamed of a unified, standardized German dog army, the sons and daughters and nieces and nephews of Horand. At first the military ignored his proposal. Von Stephanitz then donated a number of his German shepherds to local police departments, where they quickly proved their worth. The military noticed and reconsidered, and soon hundreds and then thousands of these new German shepherd dogs joined the ranks.

  5.

  After months of waiting, Lee’s squadron was transferred from England to France and was headquartered near Toul, a Gothic town on the Moselle River that had once been sacked by Attila the Hun. Toul had so far been untouched by the war, even though it was just fifty miles from the stone-ringed citadel town of Verdun, where a deadly battle had been fought just two years earlier. Verdun was a war prize: it was an important midpoint on the “sacred road,” as the main supply route from Paris to the battlefront was called. The Germans and French had squared off at Verdun for almost a year in a clash that alternated between ferocity and numbing dullness. Sixty million artillery shells were fired, pocking the hills and battering the fields until Verdun was a mire of mud. Between the assaults, nothing moved, nothing happened. The soldiers sat in bored terror in their trenches. Many used their idle hours to make “trench art”—tiny animal figurines sculpted out of spent bullets, war scenes carved on shell casings, little cars and trucks whittled out of bits of bone or wood. Somehow, being in an ugly place inspired them to make things that were beautiful or playful. Eleven months into the conflict, the French finally pushed forward and the Germans pulled back, abandoning field guns, artillery, vehicles, and animals in the pudding of the Verdun battlefield. By then, more than half a million soldiers had been injured and more than a quarter of a million had been killed.

  One of the heroes of the Battle of Verdun was Satan, a mongrel with gray fur and a small, thick body. It is hard to know what Satan’s face looked like because the only photograph of him that still exists shows him wearing a gas mask, which obscures all but the base of his ears. During the battle, a contingent of French troops had been sent forward but soon disappeared in the haze of fighting. Satan was dispatched to look for the lost troops. Picking his way through enemy lines, Satan was shot twice, but he kept going. He located the men and ran toward them. According to the soldiers, he seemed to materialize out of the smoke of the battlefield. Because he was wearing his gas mask and a backpack, some mistook him for a small angel with large wings.

  In Toul, the Americans waited anxiously to be called to the front, where the fatalities were mounting. They had been welcomed in the village as potential liberators, as well as a reliable source of chocolate and chewing gum, and in the afternoons, neighborhood children hung out at the army mess, looking for handouts or curiosities. The soldiers liked their company. One nine-year-old boy, who had been orphaned in an air raid, was taken in as the squadron’s mascot. The soldiers made the boy his own American uniform and taught him to speak a little English. He lived on the base and helped out in the kitchen.

  Then one day the French authorities took the boy away from the squadron and sent him to an orphanage, and the soldiers never saw him again. “We all missed him,” Duncan wrote in his memoir, “but I think our Mess Sergeant missed him most of all. To forget his little chum, the sergeant went in to Toul and tried to drown his sorrow in cognac.”

  6.

  In September 1918, General John Pershing launched the Saint-Mihiel offensive,
one of the first major American assaults in the war. It was an attempt to push the Germans east out of the Meuse Valley. The Germans were dug in, and the Allied advance was agonizing. The air was thick with driving rain and the ground was churned into hip-deep mud. Lee was assigned to the armory department, but so many pilots were being killed or injured that even soldiers in his low position were told they might be placed on flying status when the biggest push of the offensive began.

  Lee’s account of this dark time is soldierly and understated. In his memoir he lists which pilot flew which mission and who did and didn’t come back. The more detailed accounting is reserved for the types of planes and equipment used. If this wasn’t precisely what he envisioned when he enlisted in southern California the previous year, there is no mention of that fact. What Lee did recall, though—vividly, obsessively—was the morning of September 15, when he was sent to inspect the ruins of a German encampment in Fluiry, northwest of Toul, to determine if it would make a suitable flying field. Fluiry was a tiny farm town with a punishing history. It had been destroyed twice previously in wars, had been rebuilt, and now was ruined again. In World War I it had already changed hands several times. When Lee was sent to do the inspection, the Germans had just retreated, leaving the broken town behind.

  Lee implies in his memoir that he went to Fluiry alone, although it is surprising that a soldier would be sent near the front lines unaccompanied. He might have been with a few other soldiers, or he might have traveled there with George Bryant, the captain of another squadron, whom Lee had come to know. It is hard—impossible, really—to know. By his description, he strolled around the field in Fluiry, taking stock of the place and looking for the battlefield mementos the troops most prized—small engine parts, called Bosch Magnetos, from the Germans’ tough Fokker planes. He noticed a long, low concrete building at the edge of the field. Because he was familiar with dogs, he knew immediately that the building was a kennel, probably built by the Germans for their canine troops.

  He stooped down and looked inside the building. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw a hellish image of slaughter: twenty or more dogs, killed by artillery shells. He stepped into the kennel and made his way among the bodies. They were clearly army dogs; one had a messenger-pigeon cage strapped to its back, and two of the pigeons were still alive. Lee released the pigeons. In the stillness, he heard whimpering. He followed the sound to the back of the kennel. There, in the farthest corner of this shattered, deathly place, was a frantic German shepherd female with a litter of five puppies.

  It took him an hour—a “hard struggle,” in his words—to wrangle the agitated female into his vehicle. Once he had her secured, he scooped up the puppies and drove back to the base. For a moment, anyway, it probably felt as if the war had faded away. He filled an empty oil barrel with straw and set it on its side as a doghouse. “And then,” he noted in his diary, “the little family started light housekeeping.” He knew he couldn’t manage all the dogs, so after he shared the news of his discovery, he gave the mother dog to George Bryant and three of the puppies to various other soldiers. He kept the two prettiest, a male and a female, for himself.

  From the moment he found these puppies, Lee considered himself a lucky man. He believed he was lucky despite the absence of his father, the rock-ribbed loneliness of his childhood, the tough years in the orphanage, the adored pets lost to him. For the rest of his life, he marveled at his good fortune in finding the puppies, turning the story over and over again and again like a shiny stone, watching it catch the light.

  He thought about that luck when it came to naming the puppies. At that time, the most popular good-luck charm was a pair of dolls, a boy and a girl, made of yarn or silk, about as long as a finger, crude as stick figures, with a dab for a nose, a dash for a mouth, shapeless little arms and legs, and sad eyes “like periods made by the point of a pencil over which the writer had paused sorrowfully,” according to one soldier. The dolls were named Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, in honor of a pair of young lovers who had survived a bombing in a Parisian railway station at the start of the war. They were lucky, and would bring luck; as an ad for the dolls proclaimed, “Avec nous rien à craindre”—With us, you have nothing to fear. Nanette was a common girl’s name, but the boy’s name, Rin Tin Tin, was unusual; no one could even settle on how to spell or punctuate it. Sometimes it was Rintintin, sometimes Rin Tin Tin, and sometimes even Ran-Tan-Tan. And no one could explain where it originated. It didn’t seem to be a diminutive, because no proper name came close to sounding like Rin Tin Tin. It was less like a name than a tongue-clicking sound, a rhythm, perhaps even the chorus of a children’s song: Rin Tin Tin, Rin Tin Tin, Rin Tin Tin.

  Many French girls made the Rin Tin Tin and Nanette dolls by hand and gave them away, and at least one French charity sold them to raise money for an orphanage. American soldiers became eager customers. Everyone in Lee’s squadron carried a rabbit’s foot, or painted a lucky insignia on their plane, or had a girl’s name scrawled on the interior of the cockpit. When Rin Tin Tin and Nanette dolls became a fad, soldiers began to wear them on chains around their necks or dangle them from their gun barrels or helmets. Lee had bought his Rin Tin Tin and Nanette charms from a little girl in Toul, and he wore them for the rest of his life. The lucky puppies, he decided, would be given these lucky names, Rin Tin Tin and Nanette.

  The pace of the war was relentless. In addition, a flu epidemic was burning through the troops like a fuse. Lee was relieved to have the puppies to distract him. “Each day, I found them more interesting,” he wrote. “They were keeping my mind off the hectic days we were going through.” Lee’s squadron was reassigned to a field in Colombey-les-Belles, several hours north of Toul. Captain Bryant and the puppies’ mother, Betty, were staying in Toul. The puppies were still nursing, so Lee had to decide whether to leave them with Betty or take them to Colombey-les-Belles. He decided he couldn’t bear to be without them, but he could think of only one solution to keep them fed. Until the puppies were weaned, he flew back to Toul every day by wheedling his way onto one of the squadron’s planes, an offense that could have warranted a court-martial.

  Lee was hopelessly devoted to the puppies and wanted to learn everything he could about this new breed of dog. It turned out that one of the prisoners of war at the camp at Colombey-les-Belles was a German sergeant who was fluent in English and also happened to be the son of the man who had trained the dogs that had been kenneled at Fluiry—at least that is what Lee would have us believe, although the coincidence seems improbable. They talked for hours about German shepherds, prisoner and captor, absorbed in their obsession, while the war rolled on.

  In November 1918, Lee finally had a chance to fly, but on his first mission, he was shot in the arm. He was hospitalized for months. The puppies came with him. When an orderly complained about having dogs in the hospital, Lee set up a kennel for them outside in a toolshed. By the time he was well enough to rejoin his unit in Bordeaux, the puppies had grown big and rambunctious, and some of the soldiers were not charmed by their antics. Lee, already a loner, never taking part in the squadron’s frequent drinking and carousing, moved with the puppies to an old barn near the barracks. He had always loved sleeping in the barn at his grandfather’s ranch, but the barn in Bordeaux was nothing like that clean, well-tended property; it was a mouse house, a wreck. Still, Lee was happier away from the rest of the men, alone with his charges. They were old enough to start training. He used a squeaky rubber doll to keep their attention, and he let them play with it as a reward when they behaved. He loved both puppies, but he thought Nanette was the outstanding one of the two, a little brighter than her brother. He hated to be away from them. When he was granted a nine-day leave to visit Paris he entrusted the puppies to one of the other soldiers but found he couldn’t enjoy himself without them and returned to camp after only one day.

  7.

  He planned on bringing them home, although most animals in the war never left it. Transporting animals back
to the States, particularly horses and mules, was too expensive; retraining war dogs to be anything other than war dogs was thought to be impossible. The French military destroyed the majority of its dogs as the war skidded to a close. The British, German, Italian, and Russian military likely did the same. American military horses and mules were sold to the French, who butchered most of them.

  In July 1919, after the Armistice, Lee’s squadron was transferred to Brest, France, where the men waited for their orders. It was a tense, chaotic time; there were thousands of soldiers in Brest, longing to go home, and yet no one knew when they would be leaving. At last, the word came: Lee’s squadron was sailing on the F. J. Luck-enbach to New York; they were given just a few hours to prepare. Lee gathered his gear and his puppies and was preparing to board the ship when an officer stopped him, saying he needed permission from the Army Remount Service to bring any animals on board. He warned Lee that ship captains had the authority to throw any animals overboard that didn’t have official clearance, and they often exercised it. Lee left the embarkation area and made his way through the crowd to the Remount Service. He needed permission immediately, but the Remount officer waved him away, saying he didn’t have time for Lee’s case when he had thousands of animals to account for and dispose of.

  More than two thousand soldiers were leaving for home that day, each one with some complication, some need; no one had time for Lee, or for anything beyond the exigencies of the moment. In the disorder at the end of the war—the weariness, the scramble to leave, the mountains of equipment to be sorted, the unsettling diffusion of focus after five years of dire, burning purpose, the scores of urgent unfolding and competing dramas, the romances to uncouple, the friends to reconnect, the travel plans to arrange—there was Lee Duncan, war-worn, standing still in this tumult of activity, cradling his two war orphans, as he liked to call them, vying for someone to help him, being elbowed aside, realizing he was very close to once again losing something he loved and cared about. It would have been easiest to find some French youngster and hand the puppies over, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The puppies had come to mean too much to him. “I felt there was something about their lives that reminded me of my own life,” Lee wrote. “They had crept right into a lonesome place in my life and had become a part of me.”