CHAPTER I

A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING

_France, April 8th, 1916._


The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the
Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist
of the ship a densely packed crowd of sunburnt faces upturned towards a
speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above. Beside the
speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the
left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as proud of
those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly.

Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High
over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the
wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only
yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far
away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There
followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about
sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats'
crews, and about someone who was still absent--just that broken fragment
in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around the world. A
big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours away from us
upon the waters. Could it be about her that these personages of the
ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards we heard that it had
not been an Australian or any other transport.