Tradition in New
South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order.
Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the
earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling
westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was
used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his
company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when
they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which
some cynic had misnamed the "Grass Bank," it was not Tim who volunteered
to take it. He had been in far too many hot corners to retain any of his
old hankering after them, and the Grass Bank was hotter than Booligal.
He went for the place because his colonel told him to--went cheerfully
to do a thing he horribly disliked, without letting anyone guess by word
or deed or the least little sign that he disliked it--which, if you
think of it, is more heroic by a long chalk.

It was after dark on a winter's night that he and his men--about sixteen
of them--crept out up a slimy trench deep to the knees in sloppy mud;
peered at the enemy's wire against the skyline; half crawled, half slid
through a gap in it, and disappeared, Tim leading. A white flash--a
shower of bombs--red and orange flares breaking like Roman candles in
the sky--the chatter of a machine-gun--the enemy's barrage presently
shrieking down the vault of heaven. A dozen wounded men came back
before dawn. And Tim--Tim lay with his face to the stars, dreaming for
ever and ever of red plains and travelling sheep, on the edge of Tamar
the Hammerhead's Grass Bank.

Slime Trench--Grass Bank--Gibbs' Corner--you will read of them all in
their chapter in the War's History. They were in every map for a
month--the newspapers made headings of them--they were household words
in London suburbs and Melbourne teashops. A month later the flood of
battle swept past them all in a great general attack without so much as
pausing to look. Two months--and a string of lorries pushed up a newly
made road until a policeman held them up, just as he would in London, to
let some cross stream of traffic through. One of the crossing lorries
bumped into a hole and impaled itself on a beam that had fallen off the
lorry ahead. The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep,
shell-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef
while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun