hair was matted with mud. Also his
clothes were the raggedest of all. The left leg of his trousers was rent
from knee to waistband. The skin of his thigh shone white, strangely
white compared to his face and hands, through the jagged tear. The
sleeves of his tunic were torn. There was a hole in the back of it,
and one of his shoulder straps was torn off. He was no more than a boy,
youthful-looking compared even to the men, almost all of them young, who
lay around him. He had a narrow face with that look of alert impudence
which is common on the faces of gutter snipes in large cities.

As he sat staring he spoke now and then, spoke to himself, for there was
no one to listen to him.

"We beat them," he said once. "We gave them the damnedest beating. We
strafed them proper, and they ran. The Prussian Guards they was."

His accent betrayed him. He must have come from Lancashire, from some
grimy Lancashire town, from Warrington or Bolton, from Liverpool itself
perhaps, or Manchester. Before the war there were crowds of such boys
there. They made up the football crowds on Saturday afternoons. They
made the countryside hideous on bank holiday afternoons. They were the
despair of church and chapel, of the social reformer, and often of
the police. This boy was under-sized, of poor chest development,
thin-limbed, weedy; but there was a curious light in those staring eyes
of his.

He turned to the man on his right, a great, heavy-jawed Irishman with a
bandaged knee, who was sound asleep.

"Wake up, Pat," he says, "wake up till I tell you how we strafed Fritz.
Out in the open it was, the Prussian Guards."

But the Irishman slept on. Neither shaking nor shouting roused a sign of
intelligence in him. The boy turned to the man on his left, a Canadian,
an older man with a gentle, worn face. Perhaps because he was older or
more utterly wearied out, or in pain this man waked and raised himself
on one elbow.

"We went for them proper," said the boy. "Prussians they was and Guards.
They thought they'd walk over us; but by God we talked to them, talked
to them with the bayonet, we did."

A slow smile played across the Canadian's face.

"Say, Tommy," he said, "what's your name?"

"Wakeman, Private Wakeman, No. 79362. Gosh, Canada, but we handled them
and they ran."

"They certainly did run some," said the Canadian slowly.

Then Wakeman poured out his story, a wonderful story, told in jerky
sentences, garnished with blasphemie