At the beginning of 1916 there were Australian troops stationed on Lemnos Island, men who had been withdrawn from the Gallipoli Peninsula and were waiting to be moved elsewhere. Eventually they would join the rest of the AIF and Light Horse Brigades who were garrisoned in numerous camps around Egypt. Over the coming months they would all be reorganised into an expanded, larger force, in fact in this period the AIF went from two divisions to five and the Light Horse Brigades became an ANZAC Mounted Division.

At the same time the various battalions that made up the AIF were shuffled around so that each would have a mixture of veteran soldiers, from the fighting on Gallipoli, and new recruits, from those who had recently arrived in Egypt. Many local soldiers were then transferred into battalions different to what they had originally left Australia with and some would be promoted. They would all continue to train in the deserts of Egypt until the authorities decided they would be of better use on the Western Front and from March 1916 they began filtering out of Egypt and travelling by ship to France.