The gun's crew glanced at their wrist watches. Fifteen minutes more and the lesson would be over. The Sergeant was becoming confused, and was trying to flounder through the rest of his talk. They had no mercy on him, but kept up the scratching. At last, in desperation, he said: "You men have actually been under fire with machine-guns several times. Can't one of you relate some incident of how, through some ruse, you put it over on the Boches?" Ikey, grasping this golden opportunity to break up the lecture, and slyly winking at us, started in and told how a certain gun's crew located and put out of action a German machine-gunner by playing a tune on their gun; the German tried to imitate it, thereby indicating to them by sound the exact location of the German gun, which was later put out of action by concentrated fire from their section. Of course, the whole circle listened very intently, but it was an old story to them; they were the gun's crew which had accomplished the feat that Ikey was describing. Still, anything was better than listening to that sing-song droning of book knowledge which the Sergeant had been pumping into them for the last hour and a half. The Sergeant glanced at his watch, and dismissed them. They dismounted their gun, put it in its box and stored it away in their billet. Then, reassembled under an apple-tree in the orchard, and while the rest of them indulged in a shirt hunt, Hungry went after their ration of tea. Hungry was sure on the job when it came to eating. Pretty soon he returned with a dixie a quarter full of tea, two tins of jam, a loaf of bread, a large piece of cheese, and a tin of apricots which he had bought at a nearby French estaminet. He dished out the rations, not forgetting a generous share for himself. After they had finished, out came the inevitable fags, a few puffs from each man, and the ball of conversation started rolling: Curly cleared his throat and started in: "Remember that village we passed through on our march up the line about two weeks ago; you know, the one where that big church with all the shell-holes in it was right on the corner where we turned to the left to take the road to St. A----?" They all remembered it, and turned inquiring glances in Curly's direction. "Well, this morning, when I went down to the 'Quarter' (Quartermaster-Sergeant), to draw coal, I met a fellow at Divisional Headquarters who told me a mighty interesting story of how he and another fellow rounded up a couple of spies. "This bloke, I suppose, through modesty, and to cover up his own good work, tried to make me believe that it was only through a lucky chance that they stumbled over the clue which led to the spies' arrest, but it's my opinion, and I know you'll all agree with me, that it was not so much luck as it was clever thinking. I'm not much at telling a story, but I'm going to try and give it, as far as I can remember, just the way he handed it out to me.