Favorite Sentences: A Very Small Dog
On how a Wikipedia editor created one of my favorite sentences
Behold Smoky, the Yorkshire Terrier who traveled throughout the Pacific Theater of World War 2, entertaining1 the troops, alerting her owner to incoming shells, and at one point assisting in an engineering operation, thereby probably saving several lives. Smoky’s squadron was building an airbase and needed to either run a telegraph wire through a 70’ pipe or spend three days excavating the area, exposed to enemy fire. Smoky stepped up:
“I [Smoky’s owner, Corporal William Wynne] tied a string (tied to the wire) to Smoky's collar and ran to the other end of the culvert . . . (Smoky) made a few steps in and then ran back. `Come, Smoky,' I said sharply, and she started through again. When she was about 10 feet in, the string caught up and she looked over her shoulder as much as to say `what's holding us up there?' The string loosened from the snag and she came on again. By now the dust was rising from the shuffle of her paws as she crawled through the dirt and mold and I could no longer see her. I called and pleaded, not knowing for certain whether she was coming or not. At last, about 20 feet away, I saw two little amber eyes and heard a faint whimpering sound . . . at 15 feet away, she broke into a run. We were so happy at Smoky's success that we patted and praised her for a full five minutes.”
(quote from an NBC interview, as reproduced by Wikipedia)
After the war, Smoky appeared often on television and served as a therapy dog at veterans’ hospitals and as an entertainer (she apparently knew a number of tricks). In 1957, she died at about the age of 14 and was buried in a .30 caliber ammo box at a park in Cleveland, and in 2005, her resting place was marked with a monument to “Smoky: Yorkie Doodle Dandy, and Dogs of All Wars.” You can read more about Smoky here, from an article written when she was awarded the inaugural Animals in War and Peace Distinguished Service Medal earlier this year.
I think I first heard about Smoky in a Cracked2 article, of all places, and I immediately fell in love. I am possessed of two small and troublesome terriers myself (named Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, or Azzie and Theo, for short) and have for years been inordinately fond of small terriers. Terriers have the right mix of cuddliness, orneriness, intelligence, and personality for me, perhaps partly because I grew up with cats, not dogs. I love dogs of all kinds, but can’t really see myself taking care of a St. Bernard or a German Shepherd, partly because they require a lot of exercise, which would interfere with my quest to become perfectly spherical before the year 2029.
But there’s something particularly delightful about Smoky’s story - here she is, the tiniest dog in the world, gamely hanging out in the Pacific Theater of one of history’s greatest tragedies. As one person put it in the above article, “It was out of character for such a little Yorkie to play such a big role under combat conditions.”
Or, as an anonymous Wikipedia editor put it on May 15, 2018, “She was a very small dog to be in world war 2.” [sic]
This is one of my favorite sentences in the entire world, so I thought it would be fun to focus on it, rather than a more traditional literary example, in this first installment of an occasional series3 detailing my favorite sentences in English. In future episodes I’m sure we’ll dissect H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark, and probably Fritz Leiber, but for now, it’s an anonymous Wikipedia editor from four years ago.
Who wrote this sentence? I don’t know. Wikipedia keeps its revisions, but this editor did not have an account, and is identified only by an IP address. This IP address was also used to make two other edits to Wikipedia, also on the same day, and both to the article on Siberian Huskies. These edits added the following sentences to that article: “they make great home pets and sled dogs. The huskys somtimes compete in competitions that involve racing in the snow.” [sic]. In describing these sentences, the anonymous commenter indicated that they “added some tips about the working dogs” and “added information about what the dog does in its job.” Regarding the Smoky sentence, the author wrote that they “told about smoky and how he was small but he could do it.” The anonymous author’s contribution to Smoky’s Wikipedia page survived from May 15, 2018 until June 8, 2018, when it was removed without comment by Wikipedia user Sannybear. I saw4 the sentence when I looked at the page on June 7, 2018, only one day before it was taken down.
So what do we know about this author? We can presume that they liked dogs, since all three of the edits made on May 15, 2018 involve dogs. We can see that they had a decent but imperfect command of the English language, based on the simplistic or unusual syntax of the three edits and the various typos therein. Relatedly, we can also see that they didn’t have a great grasp on what kind of sentences should be in an encyclopedia. Finally, we can see that they appeared to be affected by Smoky’s story, and may have shown some specific appreciation for Smoky being “small,” since that’s why the author chose to include the edit on Smoky’s page. From this, I would guess that the author was a child, surfing Wikipedia for information about dogs. This is only a guess, and there are alternative explanations, but I’m choosing to believe this guess, because this is my Substack and I can do what I want, and also because I like it best if that’s what happened.
Let’s turn now to the sentence itself: “She was a very small dog to be in world war 2.” I love this sentence because although it is completely inapposite, it is also exactly correct. The sentence is conspicuous next to the nearby sentences; compare it to “Smoky is credited with beginning a renewal of interest in the once-obscure Yorkshire Terrier breed,” the sentence which immediately followed it and which is still on Smoky’s Wikipedia page today. This sentence absolutely does not belong in an encyclopedia.
And yet! And yet. The entire point of Smoky’s story, for those of us hearing about it 80 years later, is exactly what this sentence communicates. Smoky was a very small dog to be in World War 2. No truer sentence has ever been uttered. Many dogs were heroes in the Second World War, yet when we think of war dogs, we think of large dogs, like Chips the Shepherd/Husky/Collie mix who took several Italian soldiers prisoner, or Gander, the Newfoundland who threw Japanese grenades back during the Battle of Hong Kong and died when one exploded in his mouth. Teacup Yorkies are rare amongst the rolls of war dogs.
Smoky was a war dog, though, who appeared, as if from nowhere, in the middle of World War 2. Amidst the chaos and carnage of this war; amidst men dying from bullets, shrapnel, incendiaries, disease, drowning, malnutrition, and more, here is a very small dog. She was only ever in the South Pacific, yet as we look back on the war, 80 years later, we cannot help but put her in the context of the war as a whole. For those of us who were born years after the war ended, which is most of us, World War 2 is more a story than a thing-that-happened; it is a single, unified concept where everything touches everything else. So when we learn that Smoky was a World War 2 dog, we can’t keep her, in our minds, where she actually was. Here is Smoky in New Guinea, yes, but we know she was there during World War 2, which did not happen only in New Guinea. So here also is Smoky at El Alamein; at Pearl Harbor; at the Battle of the Bulge. Here is Smoky at Stalingrad or amidst the Blitz; here is Smoky at Auschwitz. And she doesn’t belong in any of those places. Smoky belongs on Instagram, or in the purse of a starlet, or even on a Yorkshire factory floor, but not in the war. It’s easy now for Smoky’s presence in the war to feel saccharine and sentimental, the sort of thing they make Hallmark movies about, yet at the time, it was surreal. Bill Wynne, when he found her, must have felt like he was the butt of a cosmic joke. Here, suddenly his problem, was a tiny, helpless creature, entirely unsuited for the environment in which he found it.
But Smoky’s relationship to the war was only different from Bill Wynne’s in degree, not in kind. Each person fighting in and affected by the war (which was everyone) was also a small, fragile thing, dwarfed by the vast machines of carnage that moved around them. There was a place for individual heroism in that War, as there is in all wars, but the Second World War was not won by individual heroism. It was won by the grinding up of millions of lives into a shapeless mass of power, clad in iron. It was won by tanks and airplanes and atomic weapons and above all by the implacable mathematics of logistics, against which no one person can make a stand. The war was much bigger than any of the people who fought in it.
Worse, this is how history always is. What can any one of us do in the face of our own terrible events? We do not belong here, in the middle of climate catastrophes and economic incoherence and rising fascism and, yes, yet more wars. We are all of us little dogs, woefully out of our depth, sitting in foxholes carved by forces much larger than any one of us. We don’t belong amid the horrors we see. We are all very small, to be where we are.
Yet Smoky the Yorkshire Terrier was in World War 2, and she did not win the war, but she saved men’s lives. And I don’t really know what that means. But nearly 80 years later, some child read about Smoky on Wikipedia, and felt that the article lacked something. It didn’t explicitly communicate either the inspiration we can draw from Smoky, if we want to, or the absurdity of Smoky’s position. So this child sought to rectify this mistake, and told the world the inarguable truth that Smoky was a very small dog to be in world war 2.
I’m glad they did.
Apparently she parachuted out of a tree once, presumably because the soldiers thought it would be funny. They were right.
I haven’t forgotten about the Fritz Leiber series, but I wrote 4500 words or so for the last installment, and figured I’d give subscribers a break for a minute, since this is not (or at least not just) a Fritz Leiber newsletter.
Or at least that’s the day when I made a Facebook post about the sentence. It’s possible I saw it beforehand and then commented a few days later, I don’t remember. Given that the sentence was removed only a day after my post, it does occur to me that “Sannybear” might be someone who follows me on Facebook, such that I might be indirectly responsible for the demise of this sentence. This fills me with dread.