228 British War Dogs 



attached to the army. He says that ' Dogs are the only 

 scouts that can secure a small detachment against ambush 

 on the trails through these tropical jungles. The bush is 

 so dense, that flankers are out of the question, and the 

 trails are so crooked, and over such rough territory, that 

 the leading man, at one or two hundred yards, is out of 

 sight of the main party. The insurgents, lying in ambush, 

 usually or often let the leading man pass, and open with 

 a volley upon the waggons, and main party of the escort. 

 They open from apparently impenetrable jungle, and at a 

 range of from thirty to two hundred yards. They lire one 

 or two volleys, then usually run away. Sometimes, never 

 a man of them can be seen, and our men have simply to 

 fire into the jungle, and trust to luck. 



" ' The orders at present from the superiors are, that 

 the insurrectors shall not attack in parties less than fifty, 

 and they shall attack none but very small parties of 

 Americans, and that they shall always make use of am- 

 buscades.' This officer possessed a dog named ' Don,' and 

 he asserts that, up to date, no detachment, with which it 

 has been out, has fallen into ambuscade. ' He went with 

 us last winter on General Schaen's long southern campaign 

 and lived for more than a month on scraps of hard bread 

 and bacon. He covered six times as much ground every 

 day as any man of the column.' " 



The following is an interesting result obtained by a dog 

 in quite a different part of the world, and is written by a 

 gentleman in Java. The dog was a black Newfoundland : 



' One evening, returning from a party, the dog attacked 

 a Dutch soldier on guard duty, with the result that the 

 Dutch officials gave me twenty-four hours' notice to remove 

 the dog from their territory. 



