One night I shan't forget in a hurry. It simply rained bombs. Man after man went down. The trench was a shambles. On came the Turks, carrying our fire trench with ease; there was really nothing to stop them. They got right into our support trench. Then our chaps got to work. We bombed them back. They came again. Again we cleared them out. The position was carried and re-carried four separate times, eventually remaining in our hands. Reader, I wish you had seen those trenches when the picnic was finished. It took us a long time cleaning them up. There were all kinds of queer things sticking to the sides and to the overhead cover. One of our chaps put the thing in a nutshell. "I don't give a _something_ what the padre says," he observed, "there'll be an all-fired mix-up when they go aloft!" "Quinn's" was in truth the limit. I reckon you could get killed there a dashed sight easier than anywhere in the whole line. It was just fair hell with all the doors open. It was the place where V.C.'s were earned—but not given! Come to think of it, it would have taken a sackful to go round. Yes, that must have been the reason. CHAPTER X THE ORDER OF THE PUSH _Several Months Later._—I have just been discharged from my second English hospital, and am at present on "leave pending discharge from the Service, '_Permanently Unfit_.'" I feel pretty well that way, too. My soldiering days are over: henceforth I am a man of peace. Well, I've had a goodish innings and can't complain, even in spite of the fact that I'll never be quite the same man again. And, after all, things might be a deal worse: I might be one of those grotesque-looking bundles of khaki and rat-picked bones now lying unburied and forgotten in the scrub of Gaba Tepe, for instance. And I'd go through it all again—aye, a hundred times—sooner than have the women call me "slacker"! I say "_women_" advisedly: the "_men_" are all wearing khaki now; those "_she_-men" who aren't don't count—_they_ are just white-livered, cold-footed, rubber-spined swine! That's straight Anzac. I'd cheerfully forfeit a month's back pay to watch one of the slacker brigade read these lines, and to know that away down in the little dried-up kernel he calls his heart there still exists enough red blood to pump a flush of shame into his white girl's cheeks. "Girl," did I say? Then I ask the "gentler" sex to forgive me, for well I know that nine out of every ten women in the British Empire have far more true pluck and sand in their little fingers than the whole slacker brigade have in their useless tender-footed bodies. What right have these damned cowards to go to theatres, dances, football matches, and concerts; to lie warm in bed at night and eat soft tucker by day—to live their soft, easy-going useless lives, while I and the like of me have to go out and live, fight—aye, and die—like beasts? True, we volunteered; we just had to—being _men_! What right (I put it