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Show MS SING GAILY ON BATTLE FR!I Birds Find No Terrors in Roar of Artillery and Rat-' Rat-' tie of Musketry. PETS ARE NUMEROUS Soldiers Take Great Delight in Training Animals; Donkeys Are Wise. WITH THE BRITISH ARMIES IX FRANCE, Feb. 17. One of the distinct surprises to the newcomer at the war is to find larks singing over the front-lino trenches. One would think that birds of every sort had long since been driven far from the war zone, but, instead, they lurk in and about it in great numbers. num-bers. Very often the sudden flight o a covey from a secluded thicket or remnant rem-nant of wood has given the first signal of a shrapnel attack. The drumming of big gnus, the ''pat-pat-patter-patter'' of machine guns, the whirr and " bang " of " plum puddings ' ' and "rum jars'' sent over by the enemy-trench enemy-trench mortars seem to have lost all terror to the feathered songsters. They chirp as gaily and loudly over the muddy mud-dy "line'' as if there was no such thing in all the world as war. The British Tommy is very fond of pets. When he can safely do so he throws crumbs over tho parapet for tho larks, and if he had his way would fill up every nook aud corner of the trench with some sort of animal mascot. As it is, there is a strange mixture of pets and pests in these deep cuttings in the men themselves live a sort of animal life. It is a life no human beiug was ever intended to live, and yet the health of the troops is positively amazing. Pets Are Numerous. Of all the trench pests, the rat, of course, by reason of his size, takes precedence. prec-edence. He is everywhere. No amount of cleaning up has tended to wipe him out. In fact he waxes fatter, and fatter as the war goes on. Of the pets, the dog is by far the moro numerous aud popular. There are goats and cats and canaries and various species of mascot, but tho dog becomes more a part of the lifo than any of the others. Many a subaltern or company commander com-mander has gone ''over the top'' into battle with his dog leaping and barking happily beside him. Scores of dogs hao been killed beside their masters, and. hundreds wounded. In the fighting about ATnmptz ilnrintr the nrpat 1 1 nirli nn the Somme, a Red Cross searching party came upon a pathetic little group composed com-posed of a subaltern, his dog and four private soldiers, just as they had sprawded to their death in a burst of machine gun fire. The dogs in tho trenches have great fun chasing the rats. They will even leap over the parapet after them into "no man's land." And sometimes old "Fritz" from the enemy trenches will snipe them. There is one old terrier now in the front line who has been wouu.ied four times, f he survives the war, this old veteran is going to have a collar with four gold stripes on it. Donkeys Are Wise. The Red Cross dogs of the French hardly come under the head of pets. They are a lasting tribute to the part dumb animals have plaved aud are plav-ing plav-ing in tho great world conflict. The dogs, however, render a service scarcely more notable than the little French donkeys that carry ammunition to the front-line trenches. These little burros are as wise as they aro gray. Their long, straight ears, alivays poking forward, for-ward, are attuned to the sounds of battle, bat-tle, and when the firing gets too heavv they dart for the shelter of shell hole's and lie there with the drivers until danger temjorarily is past. r?ome or me strangest animal? of the war arc the wildcats of Ypres. The old mother and father cats of Ypres were once domesticated. But when the. frightened population fled at the first bombardment, the cats, true to all cat traditions, remained behind. Now Ypres is a wilderness of ruins and all the cats born and living there have become liko wild animals. Soldiers Spoil Lion. A Canadian sergeant-major rame marching out of the "line" a few davs ago with a magpie sitting on his shoulder. A private in the same company had a kitten curled up on the top of Ins knnpsack. All the overseas troops bring mascots with them. The. South Africans started out with a great collection of springboks, baboons, duikers and a variety va-riety of queer animals, but the climate of northern France in winter mood is far from friendly, aud the warm-weather pets have mostly been "done in." Probably the most aniazinT 0f all w-ir pets, however, was the lion cub adopted bv the Americans in the French -ivia tion service. They read in a Paris paper that a "perfect dear of a cub" was for sale and promptly sent emissaries in to buy it. They said when it grew n,, thev were going to drop it in the Herman lines, but it was spoiled into h.in.' -l pampered pet instead of a mau-e.-,7or and finally, because its plnvful howls nt nicht became a nuisance, it was sew t a zoo. |