“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.