a group of grim-faced soldiers dug a grave. And, carried by Mahan
and Vivier, the beautiful dog's body was borne to its resting-place. A
throng of men in the gray dawn stood wordless around the grave. Some
one shamefacedly took off his hat. With equal shamefacedness, everybody
else followed the example.

Mahan laid the dog's body on the ground, at the grave's brink. Then,
looking about him, he cleared his throat noisily and spoke.

"Boys," he began, "when a human dies for other humans, there's a
Christian burial service read over him. I'd have asked the chaplain to
read one over Bruce, here, if I hadn't known he'd say no. But the Big
Dog isn't going to rest without a word said over his grave, for all
that."

Mahan cleared his throat noisily once more, winked fast, then went on:--

"You can laugh at me, if any of you feel like it. But there's some of
you here who wouldn't be alive to laugh, if Bruce hadn't done what he
did last night. He was only just a dog--with no soul, and with no life
after this one, I s'pose. So he went ahead and did his work and took
the risks, and asked no pay.

"And by and by he died, still doing his work and asking no pay.

"He didn't work with the idea of getting a cross or a ribbon or a
promotion or a pension or his name in the paper or to make the crowd
cheer him when he got back home, or to brag to the homefolks about how
he was a hero. He just went ahead and WAS a hero. That's because he was
only a dog, with no soul--and not a man.

"All of us humans are working for some reward, even if it's only for
our pay or for the fun of doing our share. But Bruce was a hero because
he was just a dog, and because he didn't know enough to be anything
else but a hero.

"I've heard about him, before he joined up with us. I guess most of us
have. He lived up in Jersey, somewhere. With folks that had bred him.
I'll bet a year's pay he was made a lot of by those folks; and that it
wrenched 'em to let him go. You could see he'd been brought up that
way. Life must 'a' been pretty happy for the old chap, back there. Then
he was picked up and slung into the middle of this hell.

"So was the rest of us, says you. But you're wrong. Those of us that
waited for the draft had our choice of going to the hoosgow, as
'conscientious objectors,' if we didn't want to fight. And every
mother's son of us knew we was fighting for the Right; and that we was
making the world a decenter and safer place for our grandchi