I can’t remember her name now but she was a young Alsatian and we weren’t getting in until she’d checked us over. We’d already been through the blast barriers and the barbed wire and the metal detectors but the dog was there for one last search, and probably the surest. She sniffed my bag, found nothing to alarm her, and had a pee on the grass. No big deal. Just doing her job.

And here we are, 12 years later and she’s still on my mind, that dog at the American embassy in Kabul. It occurred to me at the time that, thankfully, she had no awareness of the madness around her, but the reality is that wherever there’s war, there’s animals – sometimes working, often suffering. One of the most horrific parts of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is his description of horses in the throes of death. “I have never heard a horse scream,” says the book’s young narrator, “and there is a whole world of pain in that sound. It is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.”

But we still do, don’t we? Mainly dogs trained to find explosives or drugs or the enemy, like the Alsatian in Afghanistan. But there are also the dogs that just turn up and are adopted by the soldiers. Then there are the animals who are abandoned or whose owners have been killed. It’s always happened. I recommend a wonderful book by John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow, which tells the story of the animals on the Western Front during the First World War: birds, cats, monkeys, you name it. They reminded the men of something other than blood and mud.

READ MORE: Afghan animal rescuer Pen Farthing is not a second Noah. He's a selfish moral imbecile, says Andrew McKie

You may think all of this doesn’t matter. You may think animals aren’t important in war, or at least not as important as the humans and that certainly seems to be the attitude of many of the people who’ve been reacting to the story of the ex-marine Pen Farthing getting cats and dogs out of Afghanistan. Some people say “waste of resources”. Some say how dare we put animals before humans.

But isn’t it actually a sign of our humanity? For a start, the cats and dogs were put in the hold of the plane – they weren’t taking up space that could have been used by humans. Also, no military resources were involved in the evacuation and it would seem that the trip was not facilitated by the British Government. And Farthing himself has never said the cats and dogs were a priority over humans. All he did was try to save some animals from the consequences of human behaviour.

We should also think, even or especially in the chaos of Afghanistan, whether we pass the simple moral test created by the relationship we have with animals. First, if we are guilty of Remarque’s despicable act of dragging animals into war, directly or indirectly, then we have a responsibility to drag them out of it if we can. And helping a cat or dog after 20 years of humans killing humans does at least prove that there is still compassion in us, and that there is still some hope of improvement.

I know some people will think that all of this is hopelessly sentimental and, fair enough, I’m prone to it with animals. And even if I am, I’m going to tell you anyway about Douglas Gillespie, a young First World War officer I was reading about the other day. He wrote to his mother at home and told her about a nightingale he’d heard singing in the trenches. “There was something infinitely sweet and sad about it, in the midst of all our noise and confusion and work,” he said. “You felt the nightingale’s song was the only real thing which would remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten.”

And he was right wasn’t he? And it’s probably true of all animals isn’t it? They don’t know what we did (and in the end didn’t do) in Afghanistan and they’re probably not capable of caring anyway. But we are. And the least we can do, in the midst of all our noise and confusion and work, is show some compassion. And sympathy. And humanity.

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