Last Updated on May 22, 2026 by admin
He was born in a trench on the Western Front sometime in 1916, and he lost his mother as a kitten. A Belgian lieutenant named Lekeux scooped him up out of the mud and tucked him inside his greatcoat, and the cat — eventually named Pitouchi — never really left his shoulder for the rest of the war.
A Belgian Lieutenant and His Cat
Lt. Lekeux was attached to a Belgian unit holding part of the line during the long, brutal stalemate that characterized the Great War. The trenches were freezing, the rats were enormous, and the men slept in mud that smelled like an open wound. Pitouchi rode out the worst of it on Lekeux’s shoulder. When the trenches were too wet, the cat would simply leap up onto the lieutenant’s collar and ride there, a small living scarf, until things dried out.
By all accounts they were inseparable. Pitouchi knew the sound of Lekeux’s voice through gunfire. He recognized his footsteps in a column of marching men. The lieutenant’s bunkmates apparently complained, gently, about how often Pitouchi was in Lekeux’s helmet when the helmet was needed for other purposes.
The Night Pitouchi Saved Him
The story that survives — the one passed down in unit histories and retold in books about animals in war — happened on a night when Lekeux had crawled out into no man’s land to scout German positions. He was sketching their fortifications on a small map, working by the limited light he had, when he heard German voices approaching. He dropped into an artillery crater for cover.
The Germans had heard something. They were circling the crater, slowly, with bayonets fixed. Lekeux had nowhere to go. If he stayed and was found, they would kill him. If he ran, they would shoot him.
What he didn’t know was that Pitouchi had followed him out of the trench. The cat had been riding on his shoulder when he set out, and apparently stayed nearby in the dark.
As the Germans closed in, Pitouchi suddenly launched himself out of the crater and bolted across the open ground. The Germans, startled, opened fire. They were shooting at what they assumed was the noise they’d been tracking. The cat — quicker than men with rifles in the dark — was already gone.
The German patrol decided the noise had been a stray cat. They moved on. Lekeux waited until they were out of range, then crawled back to his line with his map, his life, and — eventually — his cat, who returned to him before dawn.
What That Means
It’s easy to read a story like this and round the edges off it. To make it cute. But the lieutenant who wrote it down knew exactly what had happened: a small animal he had cared for had drawn fire that was meant for him. There was no instinct involved in returning. Pitouchi could have stayed away. Pitouchi came back.
The cats in the trenches of WWI were not, on the whole, decorative. They served. Estimates put the number at around 500,000 cats living in the trench networks on both sides, primarily as ratters but functionally as something much closer to companion animals. The men who survived the war wrote home about them as if they were comrades, and in a sense they were — drafted, frightened, doing a job in a place no living thing should have been.
After the Armistice
Lekeux survived the war. So did Pitouchi. They went home to Belgium together. The cat lived out his old age in a country that was, at last, no longer being shelled.
Lekeux later wrote about him. The story of Pitouchi in the artillery crater is preserved in those writings, and it’s been retold many times since — sometimes as anecdote, sometimes as legend, occasionally as proof that the bond between a soldier and a small animal can outlast almost anything that the world will do to them both.
For Memorial Day
When we list the people we lost in war, we tend to forget the small creatures who were carried into it with them. The mules. The pigeons. The dogs. The horses. And the cats — Faith in the London Blitz, Pooli on the USS Fremont, Simon on HMS Amethyst, and Pitouchi in a freezing Belgian trench in 1916, drawing fire away from a man he had decided was his.
One night in no man’s land, a cat ran out of a hole in the ground so a soldier wouldn’t be found. The soldier lived. The cat lived. They went home together.
That’s the whole story. It doesn’t need any more than that. 🐾
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