They dug from their pockets and wallets those rubber balloonlike contraptions for which they had no longer any use, and they inflated them. These they set adrift on the currents of wind whipping about the fantail. Soon the space between the docks and our departing transport was filled with these white and sausage-shaped balloons—dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of them—dancing in the breeze, bouncing up and down, seeming to flutter even on the wind of noise raised between the ever-separating camps, the hoarse and vulgar hooting of the marines and the shrill and pseudo-shocked shrieking of
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