"What's that?" I said. "It's chewing gum," he answered; "real American chewing gum like the girls chew in the subway in New York." He unwrapped it, selected a piece, placed it in his mouth, and began chewing it with elaborated enjoyment. After a few minutes, he came nearer. "By golly," he said, with an exaggerated nasal drawl, "it's good gum, I'll soon begin to feel like a blooming Yank. I'm talking like a Yank already. Don't you wish you had some of this?" "I'll make you a sporting offer," I answered. "I'll fight you for the rest of what you've got." "No, you won't," he answered nasally; "it's made me feel exactly like a Yank; I'm too proud to fight." CHAPTER V WAITING FOR THE WAR TO CEASE We were still in dugouts when Art Pratt woke me one morning with a vicious kick, to show me my boots lying outside of the dugout, filled with rain water. All the night before it had poured steadily, but now it was clearing nicely. The Island of Imbros, fifteen miles away, that seemed to draw a great deal nearer before every rainstorm, had retreated to its normal position. The sky was still gray, but it was the leaden gray of a Turkish autumn day. From Suvla Bay the wind blew keen and piercing. I salved the boots from the rain puddle, emptied them, dried them out as best I could with my puttees, and put them on. Art, in his own inimitable way, said unprintable things about a rifle that had been left outside, and that now necessitated laborious cleaning, in time for rifle inspection. All through breakfast, Lew O'Dea elaborated on the much-quoted remarks of the Governor of North Carolina to the Governor of South Carolina. Rum had not been issued as per schedule the evening before. Art began a maliciously fabricated story of a conversation he had heard in which a senior officer had stated that now that the cold weather had come, there would be no more rum. Just then, some one shouted, to "Look up in the sky." From the direction of the trenches a dark cloud was coming rapidly toward us. (A few nights before, while we were in trenches, we had been ordered to put on our gas masks; for, a little to the right of us, the Turks had turned the poison gas on the Gurkhas.) At first, the dark mass in the sky appeared to some to be poison gas. They immediately dived for their gas masks. As it came nearer, however, we were able to distinguish that it was not a cloud, but a huge flock of wild geese, beginning their southern migration. O'Dea selected a rifle from his collection, loaded it, and waited till the geese were almost directly overhead; then, amid derisive cheering, he fired ten rounds at them. They were much too high in air for a successful shot, even if he had used gunshot; but even after they were almost over Imbros Island, Lew continued firing. When an officer arrived, demanding sarcastically if Lew O'Dea wouldn't sooner send some written invitations to the Turks to shell us, he subsided, and began cleaning his artillery. Until