Well, I was Irish enough to battle for what I considered my rights. I kicked strenuously. These kicks got something of sympathy from my immediate superiors and so found their way higher until finally I was in actual correspondence in the matter with Mr. Pierce, Australia’s Minister of Defense. To him I set forth my case vigorously and often and if he was, perhaps, somewhat amused at my insistence he was just enough to take into consideration the good points I offered for myself, my long service, my Indian Frontier medal, and in the end, to accept my own estimate, that I would be of greater value handling men on the actual front than being school master to the rookies at home. There were among the professional soldiers, I further pointed out to him, older men as able as I in training men and who had families dependent upon them, whereas I was not then thirty years old, and possessed no close family connections who would suffer materially if I should go the way that so many splendid, brave officers and men of my country and of France had already traveled--to the hospitals, the German prison camps or those rough-and-readily builded, nobly impressive, shell-swept graveyards which had come to existence in France. Now, perhaps, had I been clairvoyant, had I been able to see ahead what was shortly to come--the savage, awful experience in Gallipoli, the murderous, weary days and nights in Flanders and the Somme, the long suffering, the tremendous scientific ferocity of it all, well, perhaps I might not have tried so hard to bring the Minister of Defense to my way of thinking. And, yet, while ducking the appellation of hero as I would duck a Boche bomb, after all, I think that with present knowledge of what comes to a man in this great war and what can come to him, I would still have tried for my chance to play my part in the great game. What soldier worth the name would not? Well, soon enough there came a day that found us--the First Division of the Australian Expeditionary Force--on our way. We had no clear idea of whither we were bound. We thought for the most part that we were going straight to the fighting in France. There were thirty transports in all. My own crowd, about twelve hundred strong, were aboard the _Themistocles_, a converted White Star Liner that formerly traveled between Australian ports and Aberdeen, Scotland, a goodly-sized ship she was of 13,000 tons. From every other port of size in Australia other troopships had come laden. At Sydney the entire thirty were mobilized and with the Australian fleet comprising some of Britain’s greatest dreadnaughts, a complement of Japanese destroyers and a French cruiser or two we set forth on fairly smooth seas.