There was Hooper, an Australian Captain, who in civil life was a farmer on a rock-girt island off the Tasmanian coast, and had been through more than one big push in France. Williams, also an Australian officer, was a Rhodes Scholar from the University of Adelaide. He commanded Persian levies, made a hobby of dialects, and was always eager to try his growing wisdom teeth on such abstruse problems as "How the camel got his hump," or, "Why Jonah gave the whale indigestion." But he was a good {237} lad, was this youthful pedant, a fearless soldier, and an untiring worker who, in a few months, gained a surprising knowledge of colloquial Persian. Then there was Seddon, a Government land surveyor from New Zealand, who also had looked on Red War in Flanders. In cold weather, of all times, he was always shedding surplus garments, until there was a positive danger of his arriving at the stage of the "altogether." Seddon was fiercely intractable on the subject of hygiene as applied to clothing, and would hear of no compromise where his cherished principles were concerned. It was said that he was wont to lie awake at night planning new curtailments in his winter kit. Still, there must have been some wisdom in his methods, for, although thinly clad during the early winter months, he was always in perfect health, and escaped the pulmonary maladies which proved fatal to so many others who looked askance at him and his hygienic, minimum-clothing theory. We had Gordon Wilson who came from the Argentine to enlist at the outbreak of the War and attempted to leap the age-limit barrier. His ardour was somewhat damped on being refused by the Home Authorities. But, nothing daunted, he went to France, joined the Foreign Legion, and saw a good deal of fighting. He was afterwards transferred to a British Field Battery and given a commission, and lost no time in winning the M.C. In the 14th Hussars was a lieutenant named Voigt, {238} an Afrikander born, who had gone through the South African campaign. One day, riding with Voigt and his troop of Hussars in a "punitive" expedition against raiding Kurds, I asked him casually--and quite forgetful of the momentous past--with whom he had served in South Africa. He replied with the flicker of a smile on his broad, sun-tanned face, "I was with Louis Botha's commando." And such is the material out of which has been woven our thrilling island story!