nd New Zealand liked a mead of praise, or
at least encouragement, once in a while; and when men have spent two years
on end--as most of us had--in a desert land, with no one to speak to save
their own comrades, nothing to look forward to beyond their daily, deadly
monotonous work, they need a little encouragement, if only to save them
from melancholia.

The only means of getting to civilisation, of knowing again the decencies
of life, was to "go sick" as it is termed, and be sent down the line for a
spell in hospital; and no one but a congenital idiot took more liberties
with his constitution than his work made necessary; the climate alone was
more than sufficient for any ordinary man to tackle.

But what about leave, you say? It worked out on the average to four men per
battery per week--per-haps; the proviso being that no "show" was imminent,
when all leave was stopped. As a "show" usually _was_ imminent, it took
about eighteen months, with luck, to work through a battery; and other
units in proportion. Leave to England was all but unobtainable. Though your
father died sorrowing that his son should be in distant lands, though your
wife committed the supreme indiscretion, it was regretted "that owing to
lack of transport this application cannot at present be considered." Urgent
financial reasons--and they had to be urgent--sometimes provided the
coveted ticket. There were men who, despairing of legitimate means,
"wangled" leave; I did myself see an application which would have wrung
scalding tears from the eyes of a stoat, whose moving theme originated
entirely in the fertile brain of one of the man's comrades. The letter was
sent home, copied; the copy was sent to Palestine as a genuine tale of woe.
The man obtained his leave!

Sometime in 1917 a wag in the House of Commons announced unctuously to a
somnolent assembly that all men with eighteen months' service, or over, in
the Egyptian Expeditionary Force had been granted, or were in process of
being granted, leave to England. He was an optimist; or else he looked on
the Veiled Lady through smoked glasses.

The first part of this cheerful statement was ludicrous; the latter part
was true, but the process was so lengthy that the war ended leaving it
still incomplete! What actually happened at the time stated was that a
return was demanded from the various units in the E.E.F. showing the
numbers of men with eighteen months' service, or over, in the country; this
with