There is this to be said, however, in extenuation of our greenness to the business, that our early training is of the sort which ought to make for efficiency. The Australian pressman, like his cousin over here, is a child of the bush. His "beat" covers some thousands of square, solid, British miles. One day he is out in the wild West among wilder shearers, beside whom the average Tommy is a mere circumstance. There is trouble in station sheds, and wild, uncivilised war between unionists and blacklegs. Blue metal in chunks buzzes past one's ears as thick as Mauser bullets at Magersfontein; railway carriages are quickly reduced to ruins, huts and grass fired for miles round; mobs of unionists carry havoc on the luckless blackleg and let slip the dogs of war--always blue metal. This is the stuff on which the Australian pressman is fed up.
Next day he may be sent up to the flooded north: a river has burst its banks and submerged some twenty miles of settled country; occupants of single story houses find themselves high and dry on their roof-tops, others have sought shelter in trees; their household goods float gaily downstream alongside dead cattle and horses. Rescue parties in flood boats pull frantically from house to house carrying provisions and clothing for shivering women and children. These floods occur quite frequently, and your pressman soon learns to live for weeks almost up to his waist in water. He manages to boil his "billy" in the bottom of his boat without springing a leak. He will make excellent "damper" with arrowroot and Epsom salts if he can't get flour and baking powder. He will ride anything which will go on four legs, and after he has been lost on the trackless bush a time or two, he won't always travel in a circle.
He has a standing engagement in an annual encampment where 5,000 or 6,000 troops are concentrated for nine days' continuous training, and when general orders are issued beforehand notifying the exact time and spot where an engagement will take place, between so-and-so representing the enemy, whose position will be indicated by red flags, and such and such regiments representing the attacking force, who may be distinguished by blue flags. We manage those things better at Easter manoeuvres than we do on service. Here, they don't send round cards of invitation to correspondents when a fight is going to take place. One has to chase round the country after it, fighting staff officers on the lines of communication all the way. But that is another story. Since our present illustrious Commander-in-Chief has taken over the conduct of the campaign we haven't been able to raise much of a grumble, and what happened prior to this is forgotten--at least for the time.