This tale of "arms and the man" opens on March 3, 1916. A party of officers and men of the 16th Battalion stood lined up on the parade-ground in the large Australian camp at Tel-el-Kebir. Altogether they numbered but four officers and 350 other ranks. The colonel of the 16th was addressing the assembled men. With blunt but sympathetic directness he was telling them that they were leaving the 16th Battalion, they were going on the strength of a new formation to be known as the 48th Battalion, they were all right good fellows whom he was very sorry to lose, but that the exigencies of the service demanded it, and he was quite certain they would give a good account of themselves in their new unit and prove worthy of their old battalion.
The brief speech apparently so conventional was full of unwelcome significance to all present; to the intently listening soldiers it had the pathos of a farewell. No man is more susceptible to a bit of manly sentiment than the Australian soldier. The men liked their old colonel. Personal courage counts much with the soldier, and this colonel's courage had given his name to a bit of ground on Gallipoli. They liked their old battalion, for the 16th had come through the campaign on Gallipoli and that was at the time their criterion of worth. Now they were being detailed to one of the "war-baby" formations, and even as the colonel spoke they eyed with some resentment a tall officer standing near to him. He was not unknown to many of them, for he too had been at Gallipoli. But to them he was an alien, of another battalion, indeed of another brigade, and the soldier is ever a regimental bigot. They were willing to admire him from a distance, but here he was presented as about to assume that close, domestic relationship involved in being one of them, and the commander of them. That officer was Major R. L. Leane, appointed from the 11th Battalion to command the new formation. With a curt "Thank you" and salute to the colonel, he now came forward, gave the order "48th Battalion, 'shun," marched them off, and their inclusion in the 48th was an accomplished fact before their gloomy anticipation of it had ceased.
The men marched to another part of the camp where a working party had already erected two lines of tents. There they halted whilst the few officers busied themselves with details as to the allotting of tents. Captain Woollard, the medical officer of the new unit, was present, a strange figure in a pair of slacks with cap perched on the back of his head. He was critically eyeing the crowd, for he had seen many of their kind during his sojourn on Gallipoli and was perhaps wondering how often he should deny the existence of their arches and ills. The quizzing diggers took careful stock of him also, wondering what manner of officer was this, as they filed into their tents with their various sections. They were to be much enlightened concerning him afterwards.
The week that followed saw other officers and non-commissioned officers join the new command, some reporting from other units, some coming from the training battalion. It was during this week that Captain A. P. Imlay reported for duty as second-in-command, and at the end of the week a draft of four officers and 406 men came to the unit.
The more definite organisation of these details and of battalion headquarters now commenced. It was not an inspiring task, for the reinforcements were arriving very short of equipment, many of them without rifles and with little training. The greatest trouble, however, was the shortage of officers, and to remedy this a board was appointed in the battalion to examine non-commissioned officers with a view to determining their suitability for commissions. A week later ten of these non-commissioned officers were promoted to the rank of second-lieutenant. On the 14th of the month Lieut. Ben Leane reported from the Imperial Camel Corps and took on the duties of adjutant to the battalion.
The battalion was now little short of full strength in men, and was daily receiving more officers. About this time however, the unit was anything but a constant quantity. Parties of men would march into camp who, it would be afterwards discovered, were intended for other units, and to those units be finally forwarded after adding to the battalion's numbers for a few days. It was a time, too, when reinforcements were plentiful for Gallipoli had long ceased to take its toll of them, so battalion commanders could afford to pick and choose. Consequently men were more readily transferred to other units than at a later date.
Although the battalion was then showing daily fluctuations in its parade status, its personnel was typical of the class who continued to reinforce it throughout the period of its existence as a unit. Western Australia sent its big, motley proportion, strong, hard men from the goldfields who had learned to give and take hard knocks in many a mining camp. Big, loose-limbed fellows come from the back-blocks where timber-cutting and log-splitting provided their work and their play. Men came from the up-country stores, where the storeman has nothing in common with his anaemic colleague of the city, but is a brawny fellow accustomed to juggle with heavy sacks and between times with the burly form of a bushman inclined to be offensive in celebrating his visit to the township. There were blacksmiths and mining engineers, and men who worked on the railways, and men who would tell you with a laugh that they had never worked at all, but had carried their swag from Fremantle to the Northern Territory.
From South Australia came farm labourers hardened by that nomadic existence of the casual labourer. Came men of substance, too, farmers and the sons of farmers, and completely lost their identity in the medley of khaki, a great leveller of social inequalities. If that identity was afterwards discovered, its discovery lay far apart from any reasons associated with their former position.
They were for the most part of the country, those men of the South and West, and therefore they were the best of material. Even those who came from the towns were not city-bred in the sense in which the term is generally understood. In that young land but few years had intervened between country and town. Their fathers had been of the fields. They themselves were accustomd [sic] to indulge a taste for the opener life of the country with a freedom not accorded to the city-born son of the old world. The life of the bush was in their blood, and so it was that the primitime [sic] conditions of active service found them easily adaptable to a life of campaigning.
And not a few there were who had come out to Australia from England, from Ireland, from Scotland, young fellows whose coming out in the first instance showed no lack of initiative, and whose endurance was further tested by the ups and downs of fortune that the immigrant encounters in Australia.
Of such men was the 48th Battalion. They were not a kid-glove lot of men, and required something firmer than kidglove handling. Those of them who drank, drank deep and were noisy in their cups and strong in their language. Most of them were at that time ill-trained soldiers, or not trained at all. Some of them were bad soldiers even after much training. Very few of them proved bad fighters. All in all they were good fellows, with a manly simplicity of character that made them amenable as schoolboys to anyone in whom they had confidence or to whom they gave their friendship.
There was much delay about providing the battalion with regular transport, and for several weeks there were but four horses on its strength. The colonel was mounted, as also were the second-in-command and the adjutant. The chaplain on being transferred from the Light Horse wisely brought his mount with him; a fine horse, and how the chaplain came by him no one knew, whilst those who had a right to know indulgently refrained from pressing the question. Finally the company commanders were provided with hacks, and at the same time some draught horses and limbers arrived and formed the nucleus of a first-line transport. With them came a number of small-sized, vicious mules which proved utterly unmanageable, and were happily left behind when the battalion went away from Egypt.