His real object was to abuse the men at the table with him; but one junior Staff Officer, hankering after promotion, looked round for the best dug-out site; and caused to be burrowed downwards, from the bottom of a steep grassy bank which ran half-way across a neighbouring field, four narrow dark tunnels leading into low square rooms, held up with stout beams, and all connected with each other.  Two were lined with rough bunks on wooden frames folding against the wall.  Another held a table covered with papers, a telephone switchboard, and four busy clerks.  The fourth was panelled carefully with deal, the ceiling neatly gridironed with dark stained wood, a cupboard let into a recess with a looking-glass panel above it, a comfortable bunk with an electric bulb above the pillow and a telephone by the bedside.  The group commander slept there undisturbed, even when the British suddenly pushed their front forward, and the Grass Bank began to shake with the thump of 9-inch shells.  The junior Staff Officer wonders why he is a junior Staff Officer still.

The great battle climbed like some slow, devouring monster up one green slope, down the next, and up the green slopes beyond, clawing on to green fields, and leaving them behind it a wilderness of pock-marked slime.  One of the many small obstacles, which held up its local progress for a while, was some sort of nest of Germans behind a certain bank.  Several attacks had been made on it.  The Intelligence Officer of an Australian Brigade followed the Intelligence Officer of an Australian Battalion on his stomach, for one night, up to the barbed wire; and gave it as his opinion that the enemy kept his machine-guns in dug-outs at the bottom of the bank.  Later, a wild night of driving rain, and flashes, and crashes, and black forms struggling in the mud against the glint of flares on slimy white crater edges, left things still uncertain.

It was there that Tim Gibbs came in—­and Booligal.  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.