Collected Poetry by Andrew Barton Paterson

Oh the airman's game is a showman's game for we all of us watch him go With his roaring soaring aeroplane and his bombs for the blokes below, Over the railways and over the dumps, over the Hun and the Turk, You'll hear him mutter, "What ho, she bumps," when the Archies get to work. But not of him is the song I sing, though he follow the eagle's flight, And with shrapnel holes in his splintered wing comes home to his roost at night. He may silver his wings on the shining stars, he may look from the throne on high, He may follow the flight of the wheeling kite in the blue Egyptian sky, But he's only a hero built to plan, turned out by the Army schools, And I sing of the rankless, thankless man who hustles the Army mules.

Now where he comes from and where he lives is a mystery dark and dim, And it's rarely indeed that the General gives a D.S.O. to him. The stolid infantry digs its way like a mole in a ruined wall; The cavalry lends a tone, they say, to what were else but a brawl; The Brigadier of the Mounted Fut like a cavalry Colonel swanks When he goeth abroad like a gilded nut to receive the General's thanks; The Ordnance man is a son of a gun and his lists are a standing joke; You order, "Choke arti Jerusalem one" for Jerusalem artichoke. The Medicals shine with a number nine, and the men of the great R.E., Their Colonels are Methodist, married or mad, and some of them all the three; In all these units the road to fame is taught in the Army schools, But a man has got to be born to the game when he tackles the Army mules.