Four-footed saviour of no-man's land has his day

By ANDREW MacDONALD

Writing the war story of Caesar the bulldog was not an easy project for Whangaparaoa author Patricia Stroud.

"I'd sit down and write and hoped nobody walked into the room because I'd have tears rolling down my cheeks," she says.

Caesar's real-life adventures were handed down to Stroud by her grandmother, whose son, Rifleman Tom Tooman, was the dog's handler in World War I.

"She used to tell me the stories ... then I thought I'd rough up a story and it went from there."

Stroud wrote the illustrated children's book to ensure Caesar's story lived on not just in her family, but among children everywhere.

Rifleman Tooman was assigned the bulldog shortly before sailing for the battlefields in early 1916.

Caesar had been trained by the Red Cross to rescue wounded New Zealand soldiers from almost certain death in no-man's land.

By September 1916, he and Rifleman Tooman were working as a team on the Somme battlefield, north of Paris.

"Dead soldiers lay all around with terrible wounds, and the sticky mud and deep bomb craters made it very difficult for him to work," Stroud says in her book.

"But Caesar remembered his training, and kept running and searching until he found a man lying down.

"He was still alive, but Caesar could smell blood on him, and he saw the soldier's leg was badly wounded.

"The man groaned, so Caesar sniffed around until he found the man's helmet, and carried it back to Tom."

The pair then guided stretcher-bearers to the wounded man.

Stroud says she began to get a feel for her subject while poring over old military histories.

"It's made me more aware of what the mothers and the wives must have gone through," says the part-time hospice volunteer, counsellor and pottery instructor.

During one research stint at Auckland's War Memorial Museum, where she also works as a volunteer, Stroud struck gold.

The museum holds Caesar's wartime collar, donated by Rifleman Tooman years after he was gassed and invalided home in 1918.

"It's a big collar. He must have been a very thick-necked dog," says Stroud, a mother of three.

The collar and a small photograph, stating Caesar was the 4th Battalion New Zealand Rifle Brigade's official mascot, are the only relics she knows to have survived.

All the more important then, says Stroud, that she record the story for her eight grandchildren.

"I didn't really expect anybody outside the family to be that interested in it.

"When I finished it I kept going over it and over it, and a friend said, 'Take it to a publisher'."

Now Stroud has been invited to a number of primary schools to tell the dog's story for this year's Anzac Day commemorations.

So what happened to Caesar? In February 1917, he and Rifleman Tooman were working frantically to rescue Kiwi soldiers wounded in a daring raid on German trenches at Fleurbaix, northern France.

Then the unthinkable happened - handler and dog were separated.

Rifleman Tooman returned later to find his faithful companion. In a deep shell-hole a soldier lay with an arm resting on Caesar's head "as if patting him". Both were dead from a sniper's bullets.

They were buried together.

- NZPA