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.