By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal

There is something high-sounding in the name Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force. The expedition with which our troop-ship cast loose justified, so far, our part in that nam...

We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo. They came in the early morning, handed u...

We left the ship's side in a barge that might have carried twice our number without crowding. Every man of us had chafed at the confinement of the voyage, but not one did not no...

It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."

The camp at Tel-el-Kebir is a good camp, as camp sites go. None the less exhilarating for that is the prospect of leave in Cairo. After retiring, you spend most of the night bef...

We were given twelve hours to collect bag and baggage and clear out from Abbassieh. It was a night of alarms and excursions. In the midst of it all came a home-mail. That was on...

It's the monotony that kills; not hard work, nor hard fare. We have now been disembarked on the Peninsula rather longer than three months. But there has been little change in ou...

A whole legion of Gallipoli maps has been published in the Press. They show the landing-places. All Australians know the Anzac positions where their sons and brothers scrambled...

The step is a far one from the signal-office of the first month in Anzac to that of December. The first crude centre of intelligence was like a Euclidean point--without magnitud...

But though Army Corps Headquarters is in touch with the flanks by both telephone and telegraph, that is not enough. Either or both may fail. But apart from that, there are some...

One knows little of the times and the seasons at which the early Gallipoli winter plays its pranks. It is fairly gymnastic in its turns of temperature. Still, we never expected...

There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty etymological influence--at any rate on...

After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed--too tired to remark, rolled in our blankets, either...

"The ----th and ----th Divisions will move from ---- to ---- in flights of ---- thousands daily. Two hundred and fifty camels will be allotted to each flight for baggage-transpo...

At Serapoeum, sprawled upon the Canal-banks just above the Bitter Lakes, you are sufficiently far from Cairo to be delivered from the hankering after the city such as gnaws you...

It's like returning to visit an old friend--rushing towards the sea of masts behind the sea of white towers glittering beside the sea of Mediterranean blue. At the first glimpse...

The map shows Port Said dumped at the end of a lean streak of sand flanking the Canal. For half the distance from Ismailia the train sweeps along this tract. There is the Canal...

You can conceive the sense of exaltation with which one would enter the South of France in June, after five months in Egypt. You can conceive better than describe it. So can the...

The natural course was to advertise. The _Journal de Rouen_ received us tolerantly, even compassionately. No one of us could speak French, but one pretty member of the office st...

I don't know what the Seine at Rouen is like in times of peace-trade. They say war has quadrupled its congestion. I well believe it. The pool is crammed below the Grand Pont--th...

Except when Lena Ashwell comes with her English concert-party, evening entertainments--that is, public entertainments--in Rouen are limited by some cinemas and two theatres that...

The steamer leaves the Quai de Paris every afternoon at two. Most days it is crowded. The War does not hinder women and the ineligible and _les blessés_ from taking their pleasu...

The road between ---- and ---- is a fearful and wonderful place in the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting gustily across it. The last of the autum...

The lines of communication one can expect to be trailed with interest. There the strings are being pulled--though that is a pitiable figure. It is more than a rehearsal for the...

The ----th C.C.S. claims to be the hospital farthest advanced on the Somme. The claim is justified. Its grounds are lit at night by the gun-flashes. The discharge of our own hea...

I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April Sabbath afternoon. It was the abominati...

At an advanced railhead one has to contend with other difficulties than that of the congestion of railway traffic, which is inevitable near the line. There are the French, who c...

The traffic on the cobbled road to Arras raises a dust--although it is cobbled. The spring green of the elms that line it is overcast with the pallor of a man under the anæsthet...

The beginning of spring in Northern France is elating above the month of May in the Rhône Valley--not because spring in Southern France is not more beautiful, but because it is...

I was sitting on a log at the crest of the splendidly high La Bouille ridge gloating over the Seine Valley. Here, from the grounds of _La Maison Brûlée_ (now raucous with revell...

At 6.30 this evening I counted eighteen of our 'planes flying home. They have a facetious trick of shutting off their engines high and far from home and floating down on resista...

The Café de Progrès stands in the Rue de ---- half-way down to the river. It's the place where merchants most do congregate. The manager of the Banque de ---- leads them. The pl...

It stands facing the Place de l'Église, with its back to the Route de ----. There is something medieval in its name; so is there in its surroundings and in its appearance. The g...

All _magasins_ of any standing are served by pretty girls. This is a point of policy. Proprietors of French shops in the towns of the War area have come to know that the man to...