If it wasn’t difficult enough farewelling a husband, sons, sometimes a daughter as they headed for far-flung shores to fight foreign battles, what about having to send the beloved family pooch to join them?
More famous are the horses, donkeys and even pigeons that served - and died - particularly at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in the crucible of WWI. Less attention is afforded the other animals that also fulfilled important roles and have done so throughout the world’s major conflicts.
This includes many a Rover and Fido.
In the collection of the Australian War Memorial is the taxidermy version of “Driver”, a scruffy terrier so small that after going to war in 1915, at its end he was smuggled back in the pocket of a soldier’s greatcoat.
Another, a jowly, brown-and-white bulldog-boxer, of course named “Digger”, was also partly preserved - his outer-self tanned - and is kept by the AWM.
A stray who wandered into the training camp outside Melbourne, Digger followed soldiers of 1st Division Signal Company boarding the Gallipoli-bound troopship.
Adopted as a mascot by 22-year-old Sergeant James Martin, apparently the first South Australian to volunteer for WWI, signing up almost immediately on its outbreak. Alongside Martin, Digger also bore witness to the hell of wartime France and Belgium for three-and-a-half gruelling years.
Not content with providing companionship and boosting morale, Digger would “go over the top” to take provisions to men out in No Man’s Land. Sometimes he’d return with what may have been their final goodbyes.
As the soldiers did, Digger suffered the effects of gassing. The men with whom he served subsequently decked him out with his own mask: at the alert of incoming, he’d rush to whoever was nearby to have it fitted over his big head.
The courageous dog would be terribly wounded: a bullet piercing his jaw, blinded in the right eye and rendered deaf in his left ear - but he survived. He made it back into Australia before quarantine rules changed.
For almost all other troops of fur and feathered variety, it wasn’t a feel-good case of Lassie coming home.
According to the book “Animal Heroes”, 136,000 horses went to war for Australia - and only a single one returned. Sandy was the steed of Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges - a descendant of one of the first Europeans to lay eyes on the Queanbeyan-Canberra region.
His horse returned to Melbourne two years after the Major-General was hit by sniper fire at Gallipoli in May, 1915. The officer was one of only two Australians killed in the Great War to be brought home. He was buried at Duntroon, which he’d established as a Royal Military College, in a grave designed by Walter Burley Griffin.
Kangaroos to cockatoos, roosters to possums, all somehow made their way to the battlefields. There’s even a photo in the AWM Archives of a barn owl.
In the ancient sea tradition, HMAS Encounter had a ship’s cat.
When it came to canines, as many as 7,000 were said to be attached to the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).
Some were strays found over there, an example of which became a Hollywood film star. Rin Tin Tin was a rescue-puppy, saved by an American soldier from a devastated French village. The German Shepherd would go on to make 25 screen appearances.
There were also pets “enlisted” by their families, sent off with lovely if heartbreaking notes: “This is a good dog. Please be kind to him”.
Their roles were varied.
While pigeons were used for communications - some of the first recipients of the Dickin Medal for Animals introduced in 1943, and an animated movie even made about them, Disney’s “Valiant” - dogs also delivered messages under arduous conditions.
So would they act as sentries warning their men, often well in advance, of impending danger. Making things more tolerable too, hunting down rats plaguing the trenches.
As donkeys have been immortalised for ferrying wounded, medical aid was provided by “Ambulance, Casualty or Mercy Dogs”.
Wearing the internationally-recognised humanitarian symbol of the Red Cross - in conflicts, a literal translation of “don’t shoot” - they’d seek out injured men. With first aid kits strapped to their backs, they’d wait beside them until the stretcher bearers arrived. If too late, the faithful hounds would stay by the soldiers as they died.
Back home in Australia, Digger remained in the care of James Martin, man and dog badly affected by their service.
For Digger, the public rallied to raise funds for his care, his cause promoted with a postcard. Giving an excellent Winston Churchill impersonation, he patriotically rests upon a flag, wearing a silver campaign collar festooned with ribbons. These items are also with the AWM.
Digger posthumously earned “Australia’s first Blue Cross Award for coming to the aid of human life”, described as the “animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross”.
One hundred years earlier on Empire Day, 1919, the holiday marking Queen Victoria’s birthday and loyalty to the Crown, Digger for the last time joined the march with his unit. That night, exploding fireworks, perhaps startling him back to a time of raining bombs and whistling shrapnel, led him to try to jump a fence, mortally injuring himself as he did.
When found, Digger was lying upon his master’s bed.
A bond forged through some of the worst that humans inflict upon one another, a faithful companion to the last.
Lest we forget.