Trp Arthur Rouget (Wandin), 13^th Light Horse Regiment: In camp in Egypt. From his diary – ‘We get up at 5 o’clock, have a cup of tea and drill till 9 o’clock as it is too hot for either man or horses in the middle of the day. We have to take our turn at guarding the Turkish prisoners at Mahdi. It is a bit of a change for us, but plenty of polishing to do. We take them out in the mornings and evening and their work is to extend their own prison. One morning nine men go escorting over one thousand to their work without a cartridge in their rifles, someone forgot to see that they were loaded before they started. We soon got over that, one man sneaking away at a time and loading so as not to let the Turks know that we had not loaded before we started. We had ten days of this and then we go back to camp at Oasis’.

Pte Ernest Clow (Lilydale), 8^th Battalion: In hospital in Egypt. In a letter to his uncle in Lilydale – ‘The weather over on this side of the world is terribly hot and dry, and we have had no rain since we landed except one – about five months ago. You can guess what it is like. The heat on the sand is just, and only just, bearable. It was 122 degrees in the shade for three days and I began to think we were coming to a death by scorching’.