“. . . . who is at his noblest when he has graduated in the shearers’ sheds. I speak not as a gourmand of the table. I sometimes think it is the primitive emotions of grief and disillusionment and ferocious despair induced by the cooking of the cooks that make some of our battalions so awe inspiring in the attack.

“No, this superiority indicated is not so much from the point of view of cooking as of character. The cook stands apart in his little niche of fame. He has with him the democracy of the shearer’s shed, coloured with the exclusiveness of the artist, the practitioner of mysteries. The work of the Divine Sculptor as it came from His chisel, rough hewn as the Master left it. What he was he will be.

“The cook stands apart in his little niche of fame eternal and unchangeable, as God and the democracy of the shearing shed made him. The Army and its War Councils, its Field Marshals, its G.S.O.’s, its N.C.O.’s, retire foiled and chagrined in their puny efforts to unmake what these two have made. . . . It is with a mixture of the two qualities—the equality of the shearing shed and the exclusiveness of the studio—that he meets them all, from Brigadiers to Batmen. A manner that frankly accepts the doctrine of the brotherhood of man with its implied admission that after all he is no better than the Colonel. . . . Yes, his cooking may be bad but his heart is good. As Mac used to sing:

“I have often suspected that Australian units select their cooks not on their ability as chefs but for the stories that can be told about them to other units. It is a sort of competition, and the cook who said, ‘I know I’m no chef from the ’otel Australia, but there ain’t a willinger cook on the Somme!’ was worth it, cooked he ever so badly. He often has, or had, a son or two in the line who probably left Australia criminally young to prove themselves men as the old man left to prove himself one of the boys. And in moments of depression, to which he is liable, he is full of mutinous threats of his intention to get back to the line again where the men are. . . .”