Two days before Christmas in 1919, a British military officer and his German war dog set off from London on an extraordinary adventure. Their journey began at Waterloo Railway Station, where the pair were delayed by a bustle of newspaper reporters and photographers. Captain Leicester Stevens was 35 years old, tall and strongly built, with clear blue eyes and a mustache. He wore a winter overcoat, gloves, and a fedora. Standing faithfully by his side was Laddie, a large, muscular dog with pointed ears and a bushy tail. Thought to be about three or four years old, Laddie was a breed known in Britain as an Alsatian Wolf Dog. Laddie appeared unperturbed by the press attention or the prospect of accompanying his master on a ten-thousand-mile expedition into the unexplored heart of Africa.
The station’s clocks showed the time was approaching 11:30 in the morning. Passengers lined up at ticket booths and dragged baggage across crowded platforms. Clouds of engine steam and the smells of coal, oil, and grease hung in the air. Among the passengers were demobbed service personnel in khaki uniforms returning home for perhaps the first time since the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front a little over 12 months earlier. Leicester had been at the Front. He had fought with distinguished bravery and experienced unforgettable horrors. It was on the battlefield during the worst of the fighting that Leicester had found and rescued Laddie — now a beloved companion with a shared understanding of the traumas of war. Since completing his service, Leicester had struggled to find a purpose in civilian life. But now, he told the reporters who gathered around him with their notepads and pencils, he had found a suitable undertaking.
Leicester and Laddie were traveling by train to Southampton, where they would board an ocean liner for a 33-day voyage to Cape Town, South Africa. From there, they would travel north to Kafue in Rhodesia, a journey of almost 1,500 miles as the crow flies — and substantially more by rail, river, and trail. Then, from a base in Kafue, they would track up into the Belgian Congo, in the heart of what many Westerners knew as “deepest, darkest Africa.” With his faithful war dog and a trunk full of weapons, Leicester Stevens was hunting for a creature that was thought to have been extinct since the late Jurassic age, which ended 145 million years ago. There had been a flurry of reported sightings in the Congo of a huge monster, which witnesses had identified as a brontosaurus. In an impossibly intriguing quest, Leicester and Laddie were setting off to hunt for a dinosaur.
Leicester was working as a consulting engineer in China in August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany. He made arrangements to head home, traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The journey took about six weeks, and Leicester later told Philip he had never been so cold in his life. After several months of training in England, Leicester was shipped to the trench-scarred fields of the Western Front. He would be involved in the war’s toughest, longest, deadliest battles — at Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. And he received a hellish welcome to the front line.
Early one morning in July 1915, Leicester’s division was embedded at Hooge, near Ypres, when its front-line defenses exploded in a wall of liquid fire. The Germans were using a terrifying new weapon — the flamethrower. Leicester and his men remained under sustained attack for six days. Philip has a brief note Leicester wrote to his family. It says: “We’re having a hell of a fight.”
A week later, records show Leicester was sent home on sick leave, suffering from neurasthenia — a nervous breakdown related to shellshock. “I had no idea,” says Philip. “It’s hard to imagine a more nightmarish situation… but he was a tough old bugger.”
Despite his trauma, after just 30 days of recuperation, Leicester was declared fit for service and reassigned to the front line. In the spring of 1916, he found himself in a desperate losing battle near Loos, France, and received a letter of appreciation from his Brigadier General for “a very good show.” Then came the muddy hell of the Somme, where more than a million men lost their lives. Leicester was mentioned twice in despatches from the British Army’s senior officer General Sir Douglas Haig for “gallant and distinguished services in the field.”
