The battalion moved off early—­its much-prized brass band at its head—­and the men who didn’t obtain leave at the tail.  The battalion is to be carried to the front in the same string of groaning autobuses which brought out its weary predecessors.  The buses are a great help immensely valued—­but the battalion has to march four miles to them—­to warm it, I suppose.  The men who did not obtain leave are carrying the iron cooking dixies for those four miles.  In the nature of things military, there will be another four miles to march at the other end.  The platoon at the tail thoroughly appreciates this.  Its philosophy of life is wasted, unfortunately, on four miles of stately, dripping French elm trees which cannot understand, and one richly appreciative Australian subaltern who can.

The battalion was not disappointed.  The motor-buses brought it to a most comfortable-looking village—­pretty well as good as the one it had left.  It climbed out, and straightaway marched to another village five miles distant.  The darkness had come down—­huge motor-wagons shouldered them off the road into gutters, where they found themselves ankle deep in the mud-heaps scraped by the road gangs.  Every second wagon blinded them with its two glaring gig-lamps, and slapped up the mud on to their cheeks.  A mule wagon, trotting up behind, splashed it into their back hair, where they found it in dry beads of assorted sizes next morning.  It was raining dismally.  The head of the column was commenting richly on its surroundings—­the platoon at the tail had ceased to comment at all.  The last couple were a pair who, I will swear, must have tramped together many a long road over the Old Man Plains towards the evening sun—­old felt hats slightly battered; grim, set lips, knees and backs a little bent with the act of carrying; and pack, oil sheet, mess tin rising heavenwards in one mighty hump above their spines.  At the gap in a hedge, where the column turned off into a sort of mud lake, stood an officer whose kindly eyes were puckered from the glare of the central Australian sun.  You could have told they were Australians at a mile’s distance.  He looked at them with a queer smile.

“Are you the Scottish Horse?” he asked inquiringly.

“We are the blanky camel corps,” was the answer.

That march at both ends of the motor trip was the adjutant’s salvation.  When the battalion splashed up to its appointed billets, and found them calculated for receiving only half of its number of soldiers awake, he shifted two-thirds of them in; and, as they promptly fell to sleep the moment the column ceased to move, he shifted in the remainder when they were asleep.

When the battalion drew its breath next morning, it was inclined to think that it was enduring the full horror of war; and was preparing to summarise the situation.  But before it could draw a second breath it was marched off to—­to what I will call a reserve camp.  It was not technically a reserve camp, which was farther on; but they knew it was a camp for battalions to rest in—­when they have been very good, and it is desired to give them time to recover their wind.  They were rather “bucked” with the idea of this resting-place.