ians who can ride at all is less than that in England;
and very few even of the good horsemen are comfortable for some time on an
ordinary English trotting-horse. Their own horses have only two gaits: the
lope and the gallop.

Of course the real boundary-rider or cattleman is without equal in his own
way. There was one grizzled sportsman in our brigade at Tel el Fara who
could do extraordinary things with a horse, and nothing could dislodge him
from the saddle. His own pony had come to him in the ordinary way from
Remounts and had been a wild, half-broken creature; five months later the
same horse would follow him about like a dog. The Australian never mounted
in the ordinary way but would give a peculiar little chirrup; whereupon the
horse at once barracked, as a camel does to be loaded, and the rider had
merely to stretch his leg across the saddle and sit down. Similarly when
dismounting he would chirrup and the horse again went down on his knees.
Any one else trying the same trick with the horse would be received with a
stare of blank indifference; and woe betide the one who tried to mount!

The highest percentage of good riders was to be found in the men from
Queensland; even the men from the other states said that, though they would
die rather than admit that any other good thing could possibly come from a
rival state.

[Illustration: SUMMER IN THE WADI GHUZZEE. [_To face p. 176._]

As fighting men there was nothing to choose between them; and the Turks
hated and feared them all impartially. In this connection a good story went
the rounds. The Turks holding a certain advanced section of the line sent a
messenger under the white flag across no-man's-land to our trenches to ask
the nationality of the troops holding them. If it was English, the
messenger said, his comrades were prepared to surrender. As it chanced, a
battalion of men from the Home Counties was in possession of the trenches,
and the messenger returned with information to that effect. Within ten
minutes the whole party of Turks were in our lines! Later, they were asked
why they had been so anxious for their captors to be English; the reply was
that they had been told, with much circumstantiality of detail, that the
Australians were cannibals and habitually ate their prisoners; and that the
Scottish and Welsh troops went one better than this, for they never took
prisoners--alive! A tall story, of course, but it is reasonably certain
that some such rubb