shrieking down the vault of heaven. A dozen wounded men came back
before dawn. And Tim--Tim lay with his face to the stars, dreaming for
ever and ever of red plains and travelling sheep, on the edge of Tamar
the Hammerhead's Grass Bank.

Slime Trench--Grass Bank--Gibbs' Corner--you will read of them all in
their chapter in the War's History. They were in every map for a
month--the newspapers made headings of them--they were household words
in London suburbs and Melbourne teashops. A month later the flood of
battle swept past them all in a great general attack without so much as
pausing to look. Two months--and a string of lorries pushed up a newly
made road until a policeman held them up, just as he would in London, to
let some cross stream of traffic through. One of the crossing lorries
bumped into a hole and impaled itself on a beam that had fallen off the
lorry ahead. The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep,
shell-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef
while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun flashes showed like lightning
on the angry low winter clouds ahead.

"What they want to get us stuck in this flaming mud-hole for?" said the
driver to the second driver. "The Huns must have had a dug-out down
there, Bill," he added, pointing to certain splintered, buried timber at
the foot of the bank.

Now there may be no such place as the Grass Bank; and there may have
been no Hammerhead nor Tim Gibbs; and he did not come from Booligal. But
the story is true to this extent--that it happens all the time upon this
battlefield.