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. 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: