Such is the embedded image of the helmeted infantryman with rifle and bayonet, we tend to forget that the four and a half years of the First World War was not just about trench warfare.

As we have already seen, probably more horses and donkeys than soldiers perished on the Western Front and elsewhere between August 1914 and November 1918.

I have yet to see comparable figures for bullocks, carrier pigeons and camels – used in the war against the Turks in Arabia. Given the nature of the war – the mud, the shelling and bombing – the figures for animals are bound to be approximate.

As for dogs, according to the online Learning History Archive, created by the late Chris Trueman, more than 50,000 dogs were drafted in to serve the armed forces of Austria and Germany and Britain, France, Belgium, Sweden, Russia and the United States.

Of these it has been estimated that 7,500 or more dogs died in active service. The price paid by animals for the human folly of the First World War is commemorated by the impressive Animal In War memorial near London’s Hyde Park.

Among the breeds used, the most popular were Airedales, Doberman Pinschers, German Shepherd Dogs and terriers. Terriers were trained to hunt and kill rats in the trenches. Rats, rats, as big as alley cats, proliferated among the hundreds of miles of multiple trenches and the waterlogged, shell-holed waste land between them.

Military dogs, depending on their size, intelligence and training, were used as sentry dogs, scout dogs, casualty or mercy dogs, messenger dogs, ratters and mascot dogs. They were also battlefield companions.

While men and horses would sink and sometimes drown in mud, dogs were lighter and nippier.

Vehicles – those that could find a way over pot-holed, muddy roads – were slow and easy targets for artillery, machine guns, mortars, rifles and marauding aeroplanes. Dogs were faster and harder to shoot at.

That’s why they carried messages, usually in a tin cylinder, and took medical aid to wounded and dying soldiers in cratered and barb-wired no-man’s land.

Casualty dogs, originally trained by Germans in the 1800s, were equipped with medical supplies to take out to stranded soldiers to tend themselves. Reportedly, a dog would stay with a fatally wounded man until he died.

The role of war dogs is at the heart of Sam Angus’s novel Soldier Dog, published in 2012. But the extraordinary true tale of Britain’s Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Richardson, the man who trained war dogs, awaits the touch of a film director.

Richardson had been training dogs in Scotland for use by the Red Cross since the 1890s. By the start of the First World War, Richardson and his trained Airedales reportedly had an international reputation.

Czar Nicolas II of Russia had 23 Airedales, as well as Dobermans and German Shepherds, attached to the Hussars of the Imperial Guard.

The German military had a preference for Airedales over their own specially-bred and trained war dogs. The British waited until 1917 to give Richardson the go ahead to set up a War Dog School at Shoeburyness.

In France the main kennels were at Etaples under the command of R E Signal Corps. The dogs, according to Graham Evans in Trenches On The Web, were originally taken from London’s Battersea Dogs’ Home. “Then, as demand grew, from Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester dogs’ homes. As demand even outstripped these ‘suppliers’, an official order went out to all police forces in the UK to send all strays to the War Dog School.

“And even after this the general public were asked to send any dogs they were unable to keep properly with the ration system in effect,” he added.

Lieutenant-Colonel James Baldwin, of the Gloucestershire Regiment, had a passion for dogs, particularly German Shepherd Dogs. In 1915 he was given a commission for France and took one of these dogs with him. The dog served with him on the Somme in France and at Ypres in Belgium After the war the reputation of Airedales is said to have waned, principally because of a Doberman Pinscher called Rin Tin Tin.

This dog was one of five puppies found in a shattered German kennel in France in September 1918 by US Army corporal Lee Duncan. He took the dog to America, where it appeared in 26 films made by Warner Brothers before dying in 1932.

Tricia Platts, secretary of Bradford’s World War One Group sent in a photograph of a Bradford Territorial soldier with his dog, taken in 1915 – two years before Britain set on Edwin Richardson to train dogs for the Army.

She said: “I can vouch for the welcome companionship of dogs by soldiers in the trenches with this photograph from my Territorials collection. You can see that they are poor quality however, the handwritten note is interesting – ‘FTB No. 4 Bridge 1915’.

“The FTB mentioned was probably the owner of the camera. He was Frederick Trafford Brocklehurst and there’s a bizarre story about a theft, a court martial and the subsequent withholding of medals – all unravelled through his father’s close connections with the Bradford business fraternity. FTB was quite a lad by all accounts.”

T&A reader Mrs Beryl E Erdelyi generously gave us three bound volumes of The War Illustrated, covering the years 1914, 1915 and part of 1917. The War Illustrated was a twopenny weekly “Pictorial Record of the Conflict of the Nations”, published by The Amalgamated Press Ltd, a magazine and newspaper group in London.

The edition for June 19, 1917, shows photographs taken at the Front of a despatch rider carrying pigeons in a wicker basket strapped to his back. The birds were used to deliver messages from positions without any other means of communication.

The edition for August 4 in the same year contains two photographs showing dogs at the Front. In one, Gibby, what looks like a particularly redoubtable bull mastiff, poses with its equally redoubtable-looking Canadian regimental CO.

Gibby was a mascot. In spite of being gassed twice, the dog still went into action.

In the other small photograph three soldiers play with a terrier, demonstrating the importance of friendly dogs to troops under the daily stress of battle.