It didn't take me long to find out how lucky I was. All I needed to do was to look around at the other eighteen hundred wounded. They landed us at Halifax, on our way to Toronto. I was laid up for quite a while, and the funny thing was now that I was home again I kept planning ways to get back as soon as I could just to show those Huns who's who. I used to lie in my clean white bed, looking out a long window onto the garden. It was calm and quiet. But I didn't seem to see it--what I saw were those blood-soaked trenches, with your pals gasping out their lives alongside of you and your leaders, falling even as they urged you to charge! It took me a while to get well and when I did I went back to the States. I had an idea. I would join the Navy. It would be a new way of meeting Fritz. I liked the thought of killing him wholesale on the sea. I enlisted as an apprenticed seaman,--that was last March. I am in fine trim, except for a scar on my leg and a bullet hole in my side. I've finished training now and I'm ready to be shipped across. Gee, but I hope we'll get a fat submarine full of German officers--and that we'll drown them like the rats they are! SECOND-CLASS GUNNER'S MATE FOWLER SPEAKS: [Illustration: A marine can do anything--even ride a horse!] THE WANDERLUST AND THE WAR I'VE been torpedoed three times--three ships gone down under me, and I'm still here. Didn't mind it much--I can swim; besides, I'm pretty used to the sea--first shipped when I was thirteen. My father and mother had sent me to a manual training school. I didn't like it. I was always playing hookey and finally ran away. I didn't care where I went just so long as it was on a ship. I knew it was the sea I wanted. Before I decided, I used to hang around the docks. I liked the smell of the water and the big talk of the old salts who had been around the world a dozen times. They didn't stay cooped up in any four walls studying geography--they went out and lived it. I knew enough about sailing to ship as boatswain. I was big for my age, so they took me on. It was a sand sucker going down to the mouth of the Mississippi. The skipper took a kind of a shine to me. He saw I wanted to study navigation so he lent me books and let me go into the chart house and work. Arithmetic was hard for me, and spelling, too, but I'd copy out words I didn't know and take them to him. I guess he saw I was in earnest. As a result I got my rate as able-bodied seaman when I was fifteen. I was in New Orleans then, and I saw a chance to ship on one of the Standard Oil boats bound for Tampico. I was crazy to go to Mexico. There was a "Mex" on the old ship and he was always talking about the sunshine and free fruit in his country. When I told him where I was bound for he wanted to come, too, but my new skipper couldn't see him. "Mex" drank too much fire water for the good of one man.