By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal

In the light of the offensive fighting of 1917 in Western Europe, a great deal of this book will appear feeble, and even flippant. Descriptions of Egyptian cities and of the Canal Zone will seem a kind of impertinence, in a book from the War-area, after tales of the fighting in Picardy. But they are published with the belief that after Peace has broken out some soldiers may find an interest in awakening the memory of their first love in the world outside Australia. For most of them, Egypt was that; and though in the desert they often declared themselves «fed-up» with Egypt, it was a transient and liverish judgment, and their relationship with this first love was never stodgy. For the East of the sort they stumbled across in Cairo and on the Canal, Australians discovered in themselves a liveliness of interest that was almost an affinity.