Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero Read Free Page A

with it—keeping a dog like Judy. It’s all part of the wonder of her story.”
    I left Rouse’s little bungalow with a box heaped full of yellowing newspaper articles, dog-eared books, photos, and reports from the POW camp survivors—much of the “library” that Rouse had built up over the years.
    “Yes, yes—take it all,” he reassured me as I asked again if he really was happy with me borrowing his library for a while. “I’ve got little use for it at my age. And if you need to come talk to me again, please do. I’m here on my own with nothing much to do other than watch the box—and there’s never anything on but repeats these days!”
    I loaded the precious container onto the backseat of my car, but as I went to say a last good-bye, Rouse held out a hand to restrain me. “You know, there’s one question you never asked that people always tend to: After what happened, do you hate the Japanese? I rather like it that you felt you didn’t need to ask that of me.”
    Rouse shook his head, his eyes lost in memories of the past. “No, no—I don’t hate the Japanese. How can you hate an entire people? I hate the guards who did those unspeakable things to us. But I could never hate an entire people. I think the hate would eat you up. It would consume you.” He laughed. “So that’s probably how I’ve lived to such a ripe old age!”
    After visiting Rouse I spent time with other survivors of the POW camps and their relatives and families, learning more about the story that was beginning to captivate me. Fergus Anckorn, the irrepressibly youthful ninety-five-year-old who survived the POW camps through his use of magic—he was once the youngest and is now the oldest member of the legendary magic circle—told me about his own incredible relationships with pets in the POW camps, including a dog, monkeys, and even a chameleon! The chameleon would lie on his chest at night while he was sleeping and flick out its tongue to catch mosquitoes. It was his de facto mosquito net!
    “Those pets—they kept us sane, you know. They were a little tiny slice of the familiar, of what we knew—of home. And somehow, you knew you had to stay alive and return at the end of a day’s hard labor to look after your dog or monkey or whatever was waiting faithfully for you! You had to stay alive for them .”
    Fergus told me about the value of those pets in sustaining the prisoners’ morale—or, more accurately, their will to live. In many cases, individuals opted to share some of their meager ration with their pet animal rather than allowing another living being to starve to death. Fergus loved dogs. He had a relationship with them that went very deep and was incredibly enduring. He was a cat lover too.
    “Once I spotted a tiny bird like a sparrow on a bush,” he told me, a rare sadness creeping into his mischievous, fun-filled eyes. “I stalked up to that bird on hands and knees. On the other side of the bush was an emaciated cat. It was a race between the two of us. I saw the cat spring, the bird took off to escape, and— pow! —I caught the tiny bundle of feathers in midair. I cooked that little bird and ate it that very evening. But when I looked at the pile of bones afterward, I felt so guilty that I’d left the cat to starve. I never could forget it or forgive myself.”
    Like Rouse, Fergus believed that those POWs who hated the Japanese were eventually consumed by their hatred. Those who forgave lived longer and happier lives. And Fergus was one of many who’d go on to explain to me the vital role that pets played as the unsung heroes of the prison camps. It was a story that few had told and one that Judy epitomized more than any other animal that had made it through the hell of the prison camp years.
    This, then, is Judy’s tale. It opens in Shanghai several years before the start of the war, when British gunboats still cruised the mighty Yangtze River, guarding British interest far into the heart of China. It