If you stand around on one foot and then another long enough, and add a bit now and then to the gaiety of the nations represented in Eddie’s home concocted tonsorial parlor you’ll hear some of these wild yarns pass uninterrupted from the right to the left ear of Eddie. And if you’re lucky you may even hear the tale of the D. C. medal—and the five wounds, and the torpedoed bark, and the time the King’s hand was kissed, and all from the lips of _Ortheris_, alias Harry C. Booton, alias Ben Welch.
And so, if you will kindly make way for the hero, whose medal is “at ’ome in me box,”—but who did not forget to bring his cockney accent along, to which he has added a dash of the Bowery—you may listen to the tale that was told to the _Sun_ man:
“I was boined down in Whitechapel, Lunnon, and me ole man died seventeen years ago in the Boer War,” the tongue of Harry began his tale: “’E was a soger under ‘Mackey’ McKenzie, and ’e was kilt over in Sout Africey. Well, when Hingland goes into this war I says to meself I’ll join out to an’ do me bit, an’ so I done wit’ the Lunnon Fusileers, and after two or three months trainin’ we was sint to Anthwerp, but we didn’t stop there very long.
“Then we fights in the battle of Mons and Lille—I don’t know how you spells that Lille, but I think it’s ‘L-i-l’—or somethin’ loik that. Well, in the battle of Mons I gets blowed up. Funny about that. You see, a Jack Johnson comes along and buries me, all except me bloomin’ feet, and then I gets plugged through both legs with a rifle bullet and I’m in the hospital for a month. When I gets out I’m transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and I goes to the Hendon or sumthin’ loike that aereodrome up Mill Hill way, fur trainin’. You see, I was a stige electrician in the Yiddish teaters on the Edgware road, and knowin’ things like that I was mide a helper and learnt all about flying machines.”
The b-r-r-r-r-r of an airplane—the first one to fly over the camp—caused Henry’s ear to cock for a second and then a smile to pop out of his face.
“’Ere’s one of the bloomin’ things now,” he went on. “Well, I was made a sergeant an’ arfter a bad bomin’ of Lunnon by the Fritzes six of us machines was sent to pay compliments to the Germans.