The letters enclosed mostly assumed the men in the trenches on Christmas Day. Other assumptions were made, notably that in the cartoon, on the Billies, of a conquering kangaroo and the inscription: "This bit o' the world belongs to us." That hurt. Soldiers are children the world over--that is to say the best and the worst of them. In the throes of Turkish toil and peril they had read in the mailed newspapers of the initiation of the Billy-can scheme. Enemy submarines were uncommonly active at the time. Hypothetical philippics used to be launched at night against the submarine that might yet sink the transport conveying the Christmas mail. Men threatened to desert to the Navy for purposes of revenge in any such event. Nothing was lost through the mundane fact that the Billies were a regimental issue--like bacon and jam and cheese. We forgot that. For a half-day (they came in the afternoon) the camp went mad. We masqueraded in fools' caps, swapped delicacies--and swapped (above all) letters. Whatever may have become of the age of chivalry since Edmund Burke mourned it in Europe, the age of sheer kindness-of-heart is vouchsafed to us for ever since reading the letters in our Billies. Those letters stand worthily beside the finest utterances with the indelible pencil from the trenches; for, after all, true heroism resides as much in those who wait and work in quietness at home for their men as in those at war. Some day an anthology of those letters should be made and published to correct selfishness and churlishness on the earth. For that there is no kind of space here. But it may be well to say, in all moderation, that no such fillip had before been given to the men in the war zone as came with those missives which lay beneath the treasures in the Billies. This was not Christmas at home; but it brought us near to it, and proved again unanswerably (if proof were needed) that intrinsic values in the gifts of this life are very little at all. The revelry of Christmas had hardly subsided when embarkation orders came again. In the mist of a December morning we struck camp and moved out from the stone pier to the waiting transports--wondering, most of us, when embarkation in the service would cease to recur, and how long it would be before embarkation would come for that long voyage across the Pacific to a Christmas under the Southern Cross. CHAPTER II MAHSAMAH "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-transport. Mahsamah will be the end of the first stage.... You will proceed to Mahsamah, taking with you ---- thousand rations, establish a depôt, and issue rations to the flights for twenty-four hours."