A Dog's Life

German newspapers barked last week that the Russians saddled dogs with dynamite and sicked them on German tanks. The Germans growled that they found 27,000 demolition-trained dogs in kennels near Pavlograd; altogether the Russians were supposed to have trained 100,000 dogs by burdening them with sandbags and teaching them to run in front of tanks. "But not a single Panzer was destroyed by the dogs," yipped the Germans.

> The Russians did use dogs to good advantage in World War I. Espionage Officer Captain Andreas Peeka thought up the idea, which is described in H. R. Berndorff's Espionage:

"Before his departure from enemy territory the spy was to acquire a dog. . . . The spy was provided with very thin paper and a small aluminum tube. The paper he covered with sketches and statistics; he rolled it up and slipped it into the tube, and the tube was inserted in the dog's rectum. . . . The trick was detected only through a grotesque accident.

"A sentry on a country road saw a peddler trudging along the road with his dog. The dog ran to the edge of the ditch, whining piteously, and apparently anxious to relieve itself. The peddler, however, would not let him stop, but dragged him along by his leash. The sentry, who was a great lover of animals, felt angry; he ordered the peddler to let the dog do what it wanted. The poor animal, which was evidently in difficulties, finally got rid of a silvery metal tube. Since the sentry had never heard that dogs were accustomed to excrete such articles, he was struck with amazement."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.