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widespread deployment of the dogs Germans had started training in the late 1800s: San-
itätshundes , or “sanitary dogs.”
These dogs carried saddlebags filled with medical supplies that wounded soldiers could
remove once the dogs arrived at their sides on the battlefield. The Germans used German
shepherds; the English used a mixture of breeds from Airedales to collies to mutts. All of
them became famous as “mercy dogs” or “ambulance dogs.” At one point during World War
I, the Red Cross estimated that ten thousand dogs were working on both sides of the front.
While their existence and their help are well documented, the skeptic in me looks at that
suspiciously round number with a bit of distrust—it makes me wonder if the Red Cross PR
machine was working overtime a century ago.
Mercy dogs dealt only with the living. That was a position that organizations like the Red
Cross maintained, even throughout World War I. Despite the combat saying “Leave no man
behind,” on the battlefield, in the fog of war, the dead are left. In war, we create piles of
dead. In “great” wars, like World War I, where Siegfried Sassoon was awarded a medal for
bravery and bitterly witnessed his comrades obliterated in muddy trenches; in “good” wars,
like World War II; in wars that we admit were disasters. During World War I and World
War II, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were left where they fell or were thrown into mass
graves. Tending to the living and wounded was already an overwhelming task. That hasn't
changed—on disaster scenes today, we prioritize finding the living before trying to recover
bodies.
“Dogs are never trained to scent out the dead,” wrote Ellwood Hendrick in a 1917 issue
of the Red Cross Magazine . “Their business is to assist the wounded.” He went on in a vain
effort to dampen the patriotic fervor that the dogs encouraged: “We do not have to go about
killing people to make dogs worthwhile.”
The issue of recovering the war dead had long been a central concern. In the United States,
the first official efforts to recover soldiers' remains were after the Seminole Indian wars of the
early 1800s. That program was highly ineffectual: The laws provided no funding from the
government to pay the expenses to return a dead family member. As Michael Sledge noted
in his marvelous history, Soldier Dead , relatives could have the remains shipped back if they
provided a lead-lined coffin to the “designated Quartermaster at a port.”
Few families could afford the coffins. Nonetheless, trying to recover soldiers—at least
those on the winning side whose families were wealthy—had begun in earnest. By the Civil
War, Sledge notes, the country started “honoring the death of the common soldier.” Although
the war dead in that conflict became a logistical nightmare, the federal government stepped
in. By 1873, more than three hundred thousand soldiers had been reinterred in seventy-four
new national cemeteries. Though the total number of dead on each side of the conflict is still
a mystery, the national cemeteries were reserved for Union soldiers. “The absence of official
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