s and obscene words. He had been a
member of the Lewis Gun team. Very early in the advance the bursting of
a high explosive shell had buried him, buried the whole gun team with
its officer, buried the gun. Wakeman and three other men and the officer
had crawled out from the mud and debris. Somehow they had unearthed the
gun. Driven on by a kind of frenzy, they had advanced again, halting,
firing a drum of cartridges, advancing again. Once more a shell caught
them and buried them. Once more Wakeman crawled out, clawed his way out
with hooked fingers, bit the loose clay with his mouth, bored through
it with his head, dug at it with his toes. This time he and the officer
were alone. They struggled to recover their gun, working fiercely, till
a bullet hit the officer. After that Wakeman went on by himself, managed
somehow to get among the men of the company to which his gun team
belonged, and possessed himself of a rifle. At that point his story
became incoherent. But about one thing he was clear. He and the others
of his company had met in straight hand to hand fighting the proudest
troops of Germany. By stabbing, lunging, battering with clubbed rifles,
they had put the Prussian Guard to flight.

"Well," drawled the Canadian, "they did run. They certainly did run
some. And what's the matter with you, sonny? Hit?"

"Buried," said Wakeman, "buried twice, and shrapnel in my leg, little
bits."

The bits were little, but there were a good many of them. Half an hour
later Wakeman passed into the dressing station in his turn. The doctor
looked him over, scribbled a word or two on the label which hung from
the lad's breast pocket, and patted him on the shoulder.

"You'll be all right, my boy," he said. "No shell shock. No D.A.H. Get
along with you. Feeling a bit hungry, eh?"

"Thank you, sir," said Wakeman. "Yes, sir, feel as if I could do with
a bit of something to eat The way of it was this, sir. We strafed them
proper, we did. The Prussian Guards they was, and----"

But the doctor had no time to listen to the story. "Get along now.
Get along. The sooner the dressing is done, the sooner you'll get your
dinner."

The story, which the doctor would not hear, bubbled out into the ears
of the nursing sister who picked the scraps of shrapnel out of Wakeman's
leg. They were tiny fragments, most of them, but there were a great
many, and it took the nurse twenty minutes to get through her job. The
story was told twice over in jer