“It’s quite true what you say, but it’s like this, sir. When my wife and the wives of the other men in the place where I live are talking it all over in the morning I couldn’t think to let her have nothing to say and the others all bragging about what their men had done with the Germans. That’s the way of it, sir.”
IF war is not a great leveler—and we have been told numberless times that it is—it is certainly the Great American Mixer, and Camp Upton, L. I., is probably the best example extant thereof, so to speak. The Bowery boy and the millionaire rub elbows—you have probably heard that before, but it is nevertheless true—and the owners of Long Island show places sleep in cots next to their former gardeners. But probably the most interesting character at Camp Upton is the barber who was at one time a sergeant in the British Flying Corps, and wears the King’s Distinguished Conduct Medal—that is, he probably would wear it if he hadn’t left it at “’ome in a box.” The New York _Sun_ says:
Down on the muster pay roll the D. C. medal man is Harry Booton, but over in the 304th Field Artillery’s headquarters company barracks they call him Ben Welch, the Jewish comedian. But for all that his real name is _Ortheris_, who even Kipling himself thought had lain dead these twenty years and more in the hill country of India. And for the brand of service for his reincarnation he has chosen the artillery—the bloomin’, bloody artillery that he used to hate so much when he and _Mulvaney_ were wearing the infantry uniform of the little old Widow of Windsor.
London cockney he was then, a quarter of a century ago, and London cockney he is today. And if there be some who say his name is not really _Ortheris_, let it be stated that names are of small moment after all. It’s the heart that counts—and the heart of this under-sized little Jewish cockney is the heart of Kipling’s hero—and the soul is his and the tale is his. And instead of telling his yarn to _Mulvaney_ he now tells it to an Italian barber they call Eddie rather than his own gentle name of Gasualdi.
From Headquarters Hill, where the Old Man With the Two Stars looks out and down on his great melting-pot that’s cooking up this stirring army of freedom, you walk a half mile or so west until you stumble on Rookie Roose J 18, where the headquarters company and the band of the 304th Field Artillery play and sing and sleep and work. In one corner of the low, black-walled washroom nestling next the big pine barracks, Eddie the Barber lathers, shaves, and clips hair for I. O. U.’s when he isn’t busy soldiering. And into Eddie’s ears come stories of girls back home and yarns of mighty drinking bouts of other days, and even tales of strange lands and wars and cabbages and kings. Eddie is the confidant of headquarters company.