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.

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