I have mentioned that we came out from England as an infantry company. Well, naturally we hoped to be attached to some battalion of the N.Z.R.'s (which stands for New Zealand Rifles). Failing that we reckoned on being split up and spread over the various infantry battalions. So it came rather as a bit of a facer, when we were paraded, told that a Field Company of Engineers and an Army Service Corps Company was required straight away, and given our choice as to which crowd we should care to take on. At first we were inclined to think it was a bit of a bluff; but no, there was no get out about it. Boiled down, it meant service with the Engineers, the A.S.C.—or our discharge and passage back to New Zealand. We didn't like this stunt at all, and at first some of the boys felt like shaking things up some; but, of course, no one held for going home, so they made the best of a bad deal and took their choice. I plumped for the Engineers; I had no hankering after the A.S.C.—or "'Aunty' Sprocket's Cavalry," as it was promptly dubbed, from the name of one of our officers who took on with it. ("Sprocket," I may say here, is not what he calls himself.) We had already been through the mill as infantrymen: we had now to start in to train as engineers. It meant hustling some, for the time at our disposal, we were told, didn't amount to much. Well, we had made our choice, and although we felt a bit sore over being rushed, we knew it was up to us to see the thing through to rights. So we got into the collar straight away, consigned the war, the Army, and the New Zealand Government to an even warmer location than Egypt—and put in overtime imbibing engineering knowledge. We had our work cut out, for we had to learn in the space of a few weeks a course that, in the ordinary run, would have been spread over more than the same number of months. But most of our fellows had done work of a similar kind, so it was fairly well into their hands. I reckon we had just about every trade and occupation that ever was in our crowd, from civil engineers, miners, surveyors, marine and electrical engineers, master mariners and mates, right down to shearers, boundary riders, roustabouts and bushmen generally. Even a few "cockies" were not missing. ("Cockie," by the way, is short for "cockatoo," meaning, in the language of Australasia, a small farmer.) Hence we made progress like a house on fire, and the officers congratulated themselves on the kind of chaps the Lord had sent them. Indeed, some of the sappers could have turned the commissioned officers down had they chosen when it came to getting about a ticklish job—and I guess the officers knew it. So we simply took the course on the run, as it were, building bridges and blowing up same, digging trenches, fixing up and fortifying positions, and so on.