Yesterday from the opposite slope of a gentle valley we watched Fricourt village taken. This morning we walked down through the long grass across what two days ago was No Man's Land into the old German defences. The grass has been uncut for two years on these slopes, and that is why there springs from them such a growth of flowers as I have rarely seen. I think it was once a wheat field that we were walking through. It is a garden of poppies, cornflowers, and mustard flower now.

Half-way down the slope we noticed that we were crossing a line which seemed to have been strangely ruled through the wheat field. It was covered with grass, but there was a line of baby apple trees on each side of it. It took one some seconds to realise that it was a road.

We jumped across trench after trench of our own. At the bottom of the valley we stepped over a trench which had a wire entanglement in front of it. It was the old British front line. The space in front of it had been No Man's Land.

Some of our men were still lying where shrapnel or rifle fire had caught them. By them ran another old road up the valley. Beyond the road the railway trucks were still standing as they have stood for two years in what once was Fricourt siding. The foundations of Fricourt village stood up a little beyond, against the dark shades of Fricourt Wood. Immediately before us, in front of this battered white ash heap, were the remains of the rusted wire which had once been the maze in front of the German line.

We found fragments of that wire in the bottom of the trenches themselves; lengths of it were lying among the shattered buildings behind the lines. The British shells and bombs must have tossed it about as you would toss hay with a rake. In the tumbled ruins behind the lines you simply stepped from one crater into another. Into many of those craters you could have placed a fair-sized room. One big shell, and two unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon balls, lay there on a shelf covered with rubbish.

Through this rubbish heap were scattered odd fragments of farming machinery—here an old wagon wheel—there a ploughshare or a portion of a harrow—in another place some old iron press of which I do not know the use. The rest of the village was like a deserted brick-field, or the remains of some ancient mining camp—I do not think there were three fragments of wall over 10 feet high left. And in and out of this debris wandered the German front line. We jumped down into those trenches where some shell had broken them in. They were deep and narrow, such as we had in Gallipoli. Back from them led narrow, deep, winding communication trenches which, curiously enough, in parts where we saw them, seemed to have no supports to their walls such as all the trenches in the wet country farther north must have. Here and there some shell-burst had broken or shaken them in.

As we made our way along the front line we found, every few yards or so, a low, squared, timbered opening below the parapet. A dozen wooden steps led down and forwards into some dark interior far below.

We clambered down into the first of these chambers. It was exactly as its occupants had left it. On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle. The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the whole dark chamber. These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one over another, packed into every corner of the narrow space with as much ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant ship. There were, I think, six of them in that first chamber. Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard. In it were a penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water. At least one of these was still full. So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke the day before. They had told me that for three or four days no water could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those dug-outs during the bombardment. The chambers seemed to have more than one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one another underground. A subterranean passage led forward beneath the parapet to a door opening into No Man's Land—you could see the daylight at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition. But here and there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or less untouched. There were slings of cartridges still hanging against the wall of the trench. There were the two steel plates through which they had peered out into No Man's Land, the slits in them half covered by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them. There was the machine-gun platform, with a long, empty belt still lying on it. There was the periscope standing on its spike, which had been stuck into the trench wall. It looked out straight across No Man's Land, but both mirrors were gone.

As we picked our way through the brick heaps there came towards us a British soldier with fixed bayonet, and an elderly bareheaded man. The elderly man's hair was cut short, and was grizzly. He had not shaved for three days. He was stout, but his face had a curious grey tinge shot through the natural complexion. His lips were tightly compressed. He looked about him firmly enough, but with that open-eyed gaze of a wild animal which seemed to lack all comprehension. It was the face of a man almost witless. He wore the uniform of a German captain.

He was one of the men who had been through that bombardment.



CHAPTER XIV

THE RAID

France, July 9th.

During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to the north, near Armentieres, raided the German trenches about a dozen times. Here is a sample of these raids.

We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron ship's tank with a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.

A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our shells streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.

I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash over the parapet to our right—perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.

"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up, and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know, but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of that trench as to prevent German supports from reaching their front line without clambering into the open fields where our shrapnel is falling like hail.

But under those two streams of overhead traffic is a third quite easily distinguishable. It comes with short, descending screams—sheafs of them together.

At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the bang as of an exploding rocket.

That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute. We always know when that crash is coming by a certain fierce orange glare which lights up the tops of our sandbags immediately before we hear the sound. Three or four times the crash and the glare came together, and a big cloud of stuffy-smelling white smoke drifted low overhead, and bits of mud and earth cascaded down upon us from the sky above; and just for two minutes the sheaf of four shells from some particular field battery, which sent them passing as regularly as a clock about five times a minute overhead, seemed to lower and burst just above us; and one or two odd high-explosive bursts—4.2, I should say—crept in close upon us from the rear, while the parapet gave several ponderous jumps towards us from the other direction. One would swear that it had shifted inwards a good inch, though I do not suppose it had. The dazzling orange flashes and crashes close around us were rather like a bad dream. One could not resist the reflection that often comes over a man when he begins his holiday with a rough sea crossing, "How on earth did I ever imagine that there was advantage to be obtained out of this?"

That was the moment which was chosen by one of the party to go along and see that the men were all right. There was a sentry in the next bay of the trench. All by himself, but "right as rain," as he puts it. Shrapnel was breaking in showers on the parapet, swishing overhead like driven hail. While the enemy is bursting shell on your parapet he cannot come there himself. Provided that your sentry's nerves are all right, and that a "crump" does not drop right into his little section of trench, there is not much that can go wrong. And there is nothing much wanting in the nerves of this infantry.

However, something had clearly gone wrong with this attack. It was quite obvious that the enemy somehow or another knew that it was coming off, and where; for he had begun to shoot back within a very few minutes of our opening shot, and he was shooting very hard. Clearly he had noticed some point in our preparations, and he too had prepared. "I will teach these people a lesson this time," he thought, as he laid his guns on the likely section.

Right in the midst of all this uproar we heard one of his machine-guns cracking overhead. Then another joined in—we could hear them traversing from flank to front and round to flank again. "Of course, the raiders cannot have got in," one thought. "Perhaps he has seen them crossing No Man's Land, and those machine-guns are on to them in the open. Poor beggars! Not much chance for them now"—and one shivered at the thought of them out there, open and defenceless to that hail. As the minutes slipped on towards the hour, and our bombardment slackened, but the enemy's did not, and no one stirred at all in the trenches, one felt quite sure of it—of course, we had failed this time—well, we ought to expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches exactly whenever we please.

Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the buttress of the trench. "Room in here?" he asked.

Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along to make room.

"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.

"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't been for the prisoner—waiting to get him over."

"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's Mr. Franks—you all right, sir?—Mr. Little was hit, wasn't he?"

So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the shell-bursts, but he talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure, clearly.

An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel shells far back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot, some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot—gas masks and bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when the wearer looked over the parapet. The prisoner was murmuring something like "Durchgeschossen," "Durchgeschossen."

"He says he's shot through," said someone, who understood a little German.

"Oh, nonsense," broke in a youth; "you were shot through the hand, old man, but you were not shot there." The prisoner was pointing to his ribs.

"Oh, you've got a rat," said the youngster, as the man went on pointing to the same place. But he tore the man's shirt open quickly. "Yes, you have, sure enough," he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of a bullet in the side. "Here, sit down, old man, and take this," he added tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a chair. The whole attitude had changed to one of solicitude.

It was while the prisoner sat there that we heard about the raid. They clearly considered it something of a failure. They had to get through a ditch full of water to their necks, then some trip-wire, then a knee-deep entanglement, then a ditch full of rusty wire, then some "French" coils of barbed wire, then more wire knee-deep, with trip-wire after that. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was heavy. They simply went on over the parapet into the enemy's trench for a few minutes and killed with their bombs about a dozen Germans, and brought in as prisoners those who were left wounded. Every man of their own who was wounded they carried carefully back through the tempest in No Man's Land. The Germans had spent at least as much artillery ammunition as we had, and in spite of all the noise they had done wonderfully little damage. We put a dozen of them out of action till the end of the war—a dozen that our men saw and know of; and they may have put out of action five of ours.

As we took a tired prisoner to the hospital through the grey light of morning, I thought I would give, for a change, an account of a "failure."

[It was almost immediately after this that the Australians were brought down to the Somme battle. From this time on they left the neighbourhood of green fields and farmhouses and plunged into the brown, ploughed-up nightmare battlefield where the rain of shells has practically never since ceased. They came into the battle in its second stage, exactly three weeks after the British.]



CHAPTER XV

POZIERES

France, July 26th.

I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that they were proud to fight by the side of them.

Conditions alter in a battle like this from day to day. But at the time when the British attack upon the second German line in Longueval and Bazentin ended, the farther village of Pozieres was left as the hub of the battle for the time being. This point is the summit of the hill on which the German second line ran. And, probably for that reason, the new line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their third line—so as to have a line still barring our way when we had broken through their second line—branched off near Pozieres to meet the third line near Flers. The map of the situation at this stage of the battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary that Pozieres should next be captured.

There were several days' interval between the failure of the first attack on Pozieres and the night on which the Australians were put at it. The Germans probably had little chance of improving their position in the meanwhile, for the village was kept under a slow bombardment with heavy shells and shrapnel which made movement there dangerous. Our troops could see occasional parties of Germans hurrying through the tattered wood and powdered, tumbled foundations. The garrison lost men steadily, and on about the night of Thursday or Friday, July 20th or 21st, the Second Guard Reserve Division, which had been mainly responsible for holding this part of the line, was relieved; and a fresh division, from the lines in front of Ypres, was put in. The new troops brought in several days' rations with them, and never lacked food or water. It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men noticed wandering through the village in daytime.

During the afternoon of Saturday our bombardment of Pozieres became heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this shell-swept country by the trees around them. It is not that they originally stood in a woodland; but when the village is a mere heap of foundations powdered white the only relic of it left standing erect, if you except a battered wall or two, is the shredded trunks and stumps of trees which once made the gardens or orchards or hedges behind the houses. Our troops had three obstacles before them—first a shallow, hastily dug trench in the open in front of the trees around the village; then certain trenches running generally through the trees and hedges and behind a trench railway; thirdly, such lines as existed in the village itself. The village is strung out along a stretch of the Albert-Bapaume road up which the battle has advanced from the first. Just beyond the village, near what remains of the Pozieres Mill on the very top of the hill, is the German second line still (at time of writing) in possession of the Germans. Another line crossing the road in front of the village was then in their hands.

On Saturday afternoon our heavy shells were tearing at regular intervals into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A German letter was found next day dated "In Hell's Trenches." It added: "It is not really a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with shells—not the slightest cover and no protection. We have lost 50 men in two days, and life is unendurable." White puffs of shrapnel from field guns were lathering the place persistently, so that when the German trenches were broken down it was difficult to repair them or move in them.

Our men in their trenches were cleaning rifles, packing away spare kit, yarning there much as they yarned of old over the stockyard fence or the gate of the horse paddock.

That night, shortly after dark, there broke out the most fearful bombardment I have ever seen. As one walked towards the battlefield, the weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out almost all the time against one continuous band of flickering light along the eastern skyline. Most of it was far away to the east of our part of the battlefield—in some French or British sector on the far right. There must have been fierce fire upon Pozieres, too, for the Germans were replying to it, hailing the roads with shrapnel and trying to fill the hollows with gas shell. They must have suspected an attack upon this part of their line as well, and were trying to hamper the reserves from moving into position.

About midnight our field artillery lashed down its shrapnel upon the German front line in the open before the village. A few minutes later this fire lifted and the Australian attack was launched.

The Germans had opened in one part with a machine-gun before that final burst of shrapnel, and they opened again immediately after. But there would have been no possibility of stopping that charge with a fire twenty times as heavy. The difficulty was not to get the men forward, but to hold them. With a complicated night attack to be carried through it was necessary to keep the men well in hand.

The first trench was a wretchedly shallow affair in places. Most of the Germans in it were dead—some of them had been lying there for days. The artillery in the meantime had lifted on to the German trenches farther back. Later they lifted to a farther position yet. The Australian infantry dashed at once from the first position captured, across the intervening space over the tramway and into the trees.

It was here that the first real difficulty arose along parts of the line. Some sections found in front of them the trench which they were looking for—an excellent deep trench which had survived the bombardment. Other sections found no recognisable trench at all, but a maze of shell craters and tumbled rubbish, or a simple ditch reduced to white powder. Parties went on through the trees into the village, searching for the position, and pushed so close to the fringe of their own shell fire that some were wounded by it. However, where they found no trench they started to dig one as best they could. Shortly after the bombardment shifted a little farther, and a third attack came through and swept, in most parts, right up to the position which the troops had been ordered to take up.

As daylight gradually spread over that bleached surface Australians could occasionally be seen walking about in the trees and through the part of the village they had been ordered to take. The position was being rapidly "consolidated." German snipers in the north-east of the village and across the main road could see them, too. A patrol was sent across the main road to find a sniper. It bombed some dug-outs which it found there, and from one of them appeared a white flag, which was waved vigorously. Sixteen prisoners came out, including a regimental doctor. There were several other dug-outs in this part and various scraps of old trenches, probably the site of an old battery. The Germans, now that they had been driven from their main lines, were naturally fighting from the various scraps of isolated fortification which exist behind all positions. During the afternoon two patrols were sent to clear out other snipers from these half-hidden lurking places. But the garrison was sufficiently organised to summon up some sort of reserve, and the patrols had to come back after a short, sharp fight more or less in the open.

After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village. By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole village was secure against sudden attack.

An official report would read: "The same progress continued on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozieres was consolidated." That is to say—in the heart of the village itself there was little more actual hand-to-hand fighting. All that happened there was that, from the time when the first day broke and found the Pozieres position practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after hour—day and night—with increasing intensity as the days went on, he rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield for miles around—that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road—eight heavy shells at a time, minute after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand—building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and again.

What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would go through a summer shower—too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk about as if I liked it—what else can you do when your own men teach you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.

On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill. The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozieres was pounded more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm. Then Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the attack.

During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards. Every day saw fresh ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had no more than two or three hours' sleep since Saturday—some of them none at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches before-mentioned—the second-line German trench behind Pozieres and the similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day—it would almost deserve a book to itself.



CHAPTER XVI

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

France, August 1st.

When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.

But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozieres. On the top of a gently rising hill, over which the Roman road ran as is the way with Roman roads, was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery under the shady trees; its orchards and picturesque village houses. When the lines crystallised in front of Albert it was some miles behind the German trenches. Our guns put a few shells into it; but six weeks ago it was still a country village, somewhat wrecked but probably used for the headquarters of a German regiment. Then came the British bombardment for a week before the battle of the Somme.

The bombardment shattered Pozieres. Its buildings were scattered as you would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged. By the time Boiselle and Ovilliers were taken, and the front had pushed up to within a quarter or half a mile of Pozieres, a tattered wood was all that marked the spot. Behind the brushwood you could still see in three or four places the remains of a pink wall. Some way to the north-east of the village, near the actual summit of the hill, was a low heap of bleached terra-cotta. It was the stump of the Pozieres windmill.

Since then Pozieres has had our second bombardment, and a German bombardment which lasted four days, in addition to the normal German barrage across the village which has never really ceased. You can actually see more of the buildings than before. That is to say, you can see any brick or stone that stands. For the brushwood and tattered branches which used to hide the road have gone; and all that remain are charred tree stumps standing like a line of broken posts. The upland around was once cultivated land, and it should be green with the weeds of two years. It is as brown as the veldt. Over the whole face of the country shells have ploughed up the land literally as with a gigantic plough, so that there is more red and brown earth than green. From the distance all the colour is given by these upturned crater edges, and the country is wholly red.



But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God-forsaken up-country township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats, in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the top of the hill, and there you have Pozieres.

I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again—perhaps men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow, somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at all. When you stand in Pozieres to-day, and are told that you will find the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least sign of movement. Dry shell crater upon shell crater upon shell crater—all bordering one another until some fresh salvo shall fall and assort the old group of craters into a new one, to be reassorted again and again as the days go on. It is the nearest thing to sheer desert that I have seen since certain lonely rides into the old Sahara at the back of Mena Camp two years ago. Every minute or two there is a crash. Part of the desert bumps itself up into huge red or black clouds and subsides again. Those eruptions are the only movement in Pozieres.

That is the country in which our boys are fighting the greatest battle Australians have ever fought. Of the men whom you find there, what can one say? Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian joke as often as not; holding fast through anything that man can imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains, doing their job all the time, both new-joined youngsters and old hands, without fuss, but steadily, because it is their work. They are not heroes; they do not want to be thought or spoken of as heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do it. And pray God Australians in days to come will be worthy of them!



CHAPTER XVII

POZIERES RIDGE

France, August 14th.

You would scarcely realise it from what the world has heard, but I think that the hardest battle ever fought by Australians was probably the battle of Pozieres Ridge.

There have been four distinct battles fought by the Australian troops on the Somme since they made their first charge from the British trenches near Pozieres. The first was the heavy three days' fight by which they took Pozieres village. The second was the fight in which they tried to rush the German second line along the hill-crest behind Pozieres. The third was the attack in which this second line was broken by them along a front of a mile and a half. The fourth has been the long fight which immediately began along the German second line northwards from the new position, along the ridge towards Mouquet Farm. It has been hard fighting all the way, and what was three weeks ago a German salient into the British line is now a big Australian salient into the German line. But I think that the hardest fight of all was that of the second and third phases—the battle for Pozieres Ridge.

Pozieres village itself was not on the crest of the hill. It was on the British side of it, where the German was naturally hanging on because it was almost the highest point in his position and gave him a view over miles of our territory. On the other hand, the German main second line behind Pozieres was practically on the summit; in some parts farther north it was actually on or just over the summit. It was from two to seven hundred yards beyond the village itself.

The German line on the hill-crest was attacked as soon as ever the village was properly cleared. The Australians went at it in the night across a wide strip of waste hill-top. The thistles there, and the brown earth churned up in shell craters, and the absolute absence of any kind of movement (simply because it was too dangerous to move), call to one's mind Shakespeare's old stage direction of a "blasted heath." There had been a short artillery preparation; the attack reminded one of our old raids up on the Armentieres front.

I have seen Germans who were in the line in front of that attack. They state that they were not surprised. In the light of their flares they had seen numbers of "Englishmen" advancing over the shoulder of the hill. When the rush came, one German officer told me, he, in his short sector of the line alone, had three machine-guns all hard at work. The attack reached the remnants of the German wire. Some brave men picked a path through the tangle, and, in spite of the cross-fire, managed to reach the German trench. They were very few. We have since discovered men in the craters even beyond the front German trench. The German officer told me that his men had afterwards found an Australian who had been lying in a crater in front of his line for four days. He had been shot through the abdomen and had a broken leg, but he had been brought in by the Germans and was doing well. We also afterwards brought in both Australians and Germans who had been out there for six days, wounded, living on what rations they had with them.

It was a brave attack. On the extreme left it succeeded. But the trenches won by the Victorians there were on the flank, not on the hill-top. The country behind that crest, sloping gradually down to the valley of Courcelette and beyond, where the German field batteries were firing and where the Germans could come and go unseen—all this was so far an unknown land into which no one on the British side had peered since the battle began.

Six days later the Australians went for that position again. They attacked just after dusk. There was enough light to make out the face of the country as if by a dim moonlight. They were the same troops who had made the attack a week before, because there was a determination that they, and they alone, should reach that line. The artillery had been pounding it gradually during the week.

The German troops who were holding that part were about to be relieved. They had suffered from the slow, continual bombardment. There were deep dug-outs in their trenches, where they saved the men as far as possible, but one after another these would be crushed or blocked by a heavy shell. The tired companies had lost in some cases actually half their men by this shell fire, losing them slowly, day by day, as a man might bleed to death. The remainder had their packs made up ready to march out to rest. The young officer of one of the relieving battalions was actually coming into the trenches at the head of his platoon—when there crashed on them a sudden hail of shell fire. The officer extended his men hurriedly and pushed on. It was about half-past ten by German time, which is half-past nine by ours.

The first sight that met him, as he reached the support line of German trenches, was two wounded Australians lying in the bottom of it. So the British must be attacking, he thought. He ordered his platoon to advance over the trench and counter-attack. But in the dark and the dust they lost touch and straggled to the north—he saw no more of them. He tumbled on with two men into a shell crater and began to improve it for defence—then they found Australians towering around them in the dark. They surrendered.

It was a most difficult business to get the various parties for our attack into position in the night, and some of the troops behind had to be pushed forward hurriedly. In consequence the officers out in front had to carry on as if theirs were the only troops in the attack, and see the whole fight through without relying upon supports. The way in which junior officers and N.C.O.'s have acted upon their own initiative during some of this fighting has been beyond praise. The attack went through up to time. The supports had to come in parties organised in the dark on the spur of the moment. The Germans had several machine-guns going. But as another German officer told me, "This time they came on too thick. We might have held them in front, but they got in on one side of us; then we heard they were in on the other; then they came from the rear as well—on all four sides. What could we do?"

Almost immediately after the Australians reached the trenches, watchers far behind could see the horizon beyond them lit by five slow illuminations, about ten minutes' interval between each. They were beyond the crest of the hill. I do not know, but I think the German must have been blowing up his field-gun ammunition.

The men in the new trenches may, or may not, have seen this. What they did notice, as soon as the battle cleared and they had time to look into the darkness in front of them, was a succession of brilliant glares from some position just hidden by the slope of the hill. It was the flash of the German guns which were firing at them. It is, as far as I know, the first time in this battle that our men have seen the actual flash of the enemy's guns.

When day broke they found beyond them a wide, flat stretch of hill-top, with a distant hill line beyond. Far down the slope there were Germans moving. And in the distant landscape they saw the German gun teams limber up and hurry away with the field guns which for a fortnight had been firing upon our men.

The Germans have twice afterwards attacked that position. In the early light of the first morning a party of them came tumbling up from some trench against a sector of the captured line. In front of them was an officer, well ahead, firing his automatic pistol as he went, levelling it first at one Australian, then at another, as he saw them in the trenches before him. He was shot, and the attack quickly melted; it never seemed very serious. Two days later, after a long, heavy bombardment, the Germans attacked again—this time about fifteen hundred of them. They penetrated the two trenches at one point, but our company officers, again acting on their own initiative, charged them straight, on the instant, without hesitation. Every German in that section was captured, and a few Australians, whom they had taken, were released.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE GREEN COUNTRY

France, August 28th.

For a mile the country had been flayed. The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open—it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of grass or a thistle to clothe its nakedness—covered with the wreckage of men and of their works as the relics of a shipwreck cover the uneasy sea.

As we dodged over the last undulations of an unused trench, the crest of each crater brought us for an instant into view of something beyond—something green and fresh and brilliant, like new land after a long sea journey. Then we were out of view of it again, for a time; until we came to a point where it seemed good to climb and peep over the low parapet.

It was a peep into paradise. Before us lay a green country. There was a rich verdure on the opposite hills. Beyond them ran a valley filled with the warm haze of summer, out of which the round tree-tops stood dark against the still higher hills beyond. The wheat was ripe upon the far hill slopes. The sun bathed the lap of the land with his midday summer warmth. Along the crest of the distant hills ran the line of tall, regular trees which in this country invariably means a road. A church spire rose from a tree clump on a nearer crest. Some of the foreground was pitted with the ugly red splashes which have become for us, in this horrible area, the normal feature of the countryside. But, beyond it, was the green country spread out like a picture, sleeping under the heat of a summer's sun.

It was the promised land—the country behind the German lines—the valley about Bapaume where the Germans have been for two years undisturbed in French territory, until our troops for the first time peeped over the ridge the other day at the flashes of the very German guns which were firing at them.

Quite close at hand was a wood. The trees were not more than half a mile away, if that. It was a growing wood—with the green still on the branches, very different from the charred posts and tree stumps which are all that now remain of the gardens and orchards of Pozieres. I remember a little over a month ago, when some of us first went up near to Pozieres village—on the day when the bombardment before our first attack was tearing branches from off the trees a hundred yards away—Pozieres had a fairly decent covering then. There was enough dead brushwood and twigs, at any rate, to hide the buildings of the place. A few pink walls could then be half seen behind the branches, or topping the gaps in the scrub.

Within four days the screen in front of Pozieres had been torn to shreds—had utterly disappeared. The German bombardment ripped off all that the British had left. The buildings now stood up quite naked, such as they were. There was the church—still recognisable by one window; and a scrap of red wall at the north-east end of the village, past which you then had to crawl to reach an isolated run of trench facing the windmill. Both trench and red wall have long since gone to glory. I doubt if you could even trace either of them now. The solitary arched window disappeared early, and a tumbled heap of bricks is all that now marks Pozieres church. One scrap of gridironed roof sticking out from the powdered ground cross-hatches the horizon. There is not so much foliage left as would shelter a cock sparrow.

But here were we, with this desolation behind us, looking out suddenly and at no great distance on quite a respectable wood. It tempted you to step out there and just walk over to it—I never see that country without the feeling that one is quite free to step across there and explore it.

There are men coming up the farther side of the slope—men going about some normal business of the day as our men go about theirs in the places behind their lines.

Those men are Germans; and the village in the trees, the collection of buildings half guessed in the wood, is Courcelette. It has been hidden ground to us for so long that you feel it is almost improper to be overlooking them so constantly; like spending your day prying over into your neighbour's yard. Away in the landscape behind, in some hollow, there humps itself into the air a big geyser of chestnut dust. One has seen German shell burst so often in that fashion, back in our hinterland, that it takes a moment to realise that this shell is not German but British. I cannot see what it is aimed at—some battery, I suppose; or perhaps a much-used road; or some place they suspect to be a headquarters. Clearly, it is not always so safe as it seems to be in the green country behind the German lines.



CHAPTER XIX

TROMMELFEUER

France, August 21st.

The Germans call it Trommelfeuer—drum fire. I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield. You will be sitting at your tea, the normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute. Suddenly, from over the distant hills, to left or right, there breaks out the roll of a great kettledrum, ever so far away. Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron ship's tank instead.

That is Trommelfeuer—what we call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid—like the swift roll of a kettledrum—you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French assault. But it is often our own guns after all—I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of them.

Long afterwards—perhaps in the grey of the next morning—one may see outside of some dug-out, in a muddy wilderness of old trenches and wheel-tracks, guarded by half a dozen Australians with fixed bayonets, a group of dejected men in grey. The cold Scotch mist stands in little beads on the grey cloth—the bayonets shine very cold in the white light before the dawn—the damp, slippery brown earth is too wet for a comfortable seat. But there is always some Australian there who will give them a cigarette; a cheery Melbourne youngster or two step down into the crowd and liven them with friendly chaff; the blue sky begins to show through the mist—the early morning aeroplane hums past on its way to the line, low down, half hidden in the wrack. The big bushman from Gippsland at a neighbouring coffee stall—praise heaven for that institution—gives them a drink of the warm stuff. And I verily believe that at that moment they emerge for the first time out of a frightful dream.

For they are the men who have been through the Trommelfeuer.

Strong men arrive from that experience shaking like leaves in the wind. I have seen one of our own youngsters—a boy who had fought a great fight all through the dark hours, and who had refused to come back when he was first ordered to—I have seen him unable to keep still for an instant after the strain, and yet ready to fight on till he dropped; physically almost a wreck, but with his wits as sharp and his spirits as keen as a steel chisel. I have seen other Australians who, after doing glorious work through thirty or forty hours of unimaginable strain, buried and buried and buried again and still working like tigers, have broken down and collapsed, unable to stand or to walk, unable to move an arm except limply, as if it were string; ready to weep like little children.

It is the method which the German invented for his own use. For a year and a half he had a monopoly—British soldiers had to hang on as best they could under the knowledge that the enemy had more guns and more shell than they, and bigger shell at that. But at last the weapon seems to have been turned against him. No doubt his armaments and munitions are growing fast, but ours have for the moment overtaken them. And hell though it is for both sides—something which no soldiers in the world's history ever yet had to endure—it is mostly better for us at present than for the Germans. I have heard men coming out of the thick of it say, "Well, I'm glad I'm not a Hun."

Now, here is what it means. There is no good done by describing the particular horrors of war—God knows those who see them want to forget them as soon as they can. But it is just as well to know what the work in the munition factories means to your friends—your sons and fathers and brothers at the front.

The normal shelling of the afternoon—a scattered bombardment all over the landscape, which only brings perhaps half a dozen shells to your immediate neighbourhood once in every ten minutes—has noticeably quickened. The German is obviously turning on more batteries. The light field-gun shrapnel is fairly scattered as before. But 5.9-inch howitzers are being added to it. Except for his small field guns, the German makes little use of guns. His work is almost entirely done with howitzers. He possesses big howitzers—8-inch and larger—as we do. But the backbone of his artillery is the 5.9 howitzer; and after that probably the 4.2.

The shells from both these guns are beginning to fall more thickly. Huge black clouds shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground, and slowly drift away across the hill-top. Suddenly there is a descending shriek, drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly near; a crash far louder than the nearest thunder; a colossal thump to the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its base; a scatter of flying bits and all sorts of under-noises, rustle of a flying wood splinter, whir of fragments, scatter of falling earth. Before it is half finished another shriek exactly similar is coming through it. Another crash—apparently right on the crown of your head, as if the roof beams of the sky had been burst in. You can just hear, through the crash, the shriek of a third and fourth shell as they come tearing down the vault of heaven—crash—crash. Clouds of dust are floating over you. A swifter shriek and something breaks like a glass bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low overhead. It bursts like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, smash, smash, smash, with one or two more of the heavier shells punctuating the shower of the lighter ones. The lighter shell is shrapnel from field guns, sent, I dare say, to keep you in the trench while the heavier shell pounds you there. A couple of salvos from each, perhaps twenty or thirty shells in the minute, and the shrieks cease. The dust drifts down the hill. The sky clears. The sun looks in. Five minutes later down comes exactly such another shower.

That is the beginning. As the evening wears on, the salvos become more frequent. All through the night they go on. The next morning the intervals are becoming even less. Occasionally the hurricane reaches such an intensity that there seems no interval at all. There is an easing in the afternoon—which may indicate that the worst is over, or merely that the guns are being cleaned, or the gunners having their tea. Towards dusk it swells in a wave heavier than any that has yet come. All through the second night the inferno lasts. In the grey dawn of the second day it increases in a manner almost unbelievable—the dust of it covers everything; it is quite impossible to see. The earth shakes and quivers with the pounding.

It is just then that the lighter guns join in with the roll as of a kettledrum—Trommelfeuer. The enemy is throwing out his infantry, and his shrapnel is showering on to our lines in order to keep down the heads of our men to the last moment. Suddenly the whole noise eases. The enemy is casting his shrapnel and big shell farther back.

The chances are that most men in those racked lines do not know whether the enemy ever delivers the attack or not. Our artillery breaks the head of it before it crosses No Man's Land. A few figures on the skyline, hopping from crater to crater, indicate what is left of it. As soon as they find rifle fire and machine-guns on them the remnant give it up as hopeless. They thought our men would have run—and they found them still at their post; that is all.

And what of the men who have been out there under that hurricane, night and day, until its duration almost passed memory—amidst sights and sounds indescribable, desperately tried? I was out there once after such a time as that. There they were in their dusty ditch in that blasted, brown Sahara of a country—Sydney boys, country fellows from New South Wales, our old friends just as we knew them, heavy eyed, tired to death as after a long fight with a bush fire or heavy work in drought time—but simply doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary Australian way. And that is all they had been doing and all they wished anyone to believe they had been doing.

But what are we going to do for them? The mere noise is enough to break any man's nerves. Every one of those shrieking shells which fell night and day might mean any man's instant death. As he hears each shell coming he knows it. He saw the sights around him—he was buried by earth and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn. What can we do for him? I know only one thing—it is the only alleviation that science knows of. (I am talking now of the most modern and heaviest of battles, and of the thick and centre of it; for no men have ever been through a heavier fight than Pozieres.) We can force some mitigation of all this by one means and one alone—if we can give the Germans worse. The chief anxiety in the mind of the soldier is—have we got the guns and the shells—can we keep ahead of them with guns and our ammunition? That means everything. These men have the nerve to go through these infernos, provided their friends at home do not desert them. If the munition worker could see what I have seen, he would toil as though he were racing against time to save the life of a man.

I saw yesterday a letter picked up on the battlefield—it was from an Australian private. "Dear Mother, sisters, brothers and Auntie Lill," it said. "As we are about to go into work that must be done, I want to ask you, if anything should happen to me, not to worry. You must think of all the mothers that have lost ones as dear to them. One thing you can say—that you lost one doing his little bit for a good cause.

"I know you shall feel it if anything does happen to me, but I am willing and prepared to give my life for the cause."

Such lives hang from hour to hour on the work that is done in the British factories.



CHAPTER XX

THE NEW FIGHTING

France, August 20th.

It is a month this morning since Australians plunged into the heart of the most modern of battles. They had been in many sorts of battle before; but they had never been in the brunt of the whole war where the science and ingenuity of war had reached for the moment their highest pitch. One month ago they plunged into the very brunt and apex of it. And they are still fighting there.

People have spoken of this war as the war of trenches. But the latest battles have reached a stage beyond that. The war of trenches is a comfortable out-of-date phase, to be looked upon with regret and perhaps even some longing. The war of to-day is a war of craters and potholes—a war of crannies and nicks and crevices torn out of the earth yesterday, and to be shattered into new shapes to-morrow. It may not seem easy to believe, but we have seen the Germans under heavy bombardment leaving the shelter of their trenches for safety in the open—jumping out and running forward into shell holes—anywhere so long as they got away from the cover which they had built for themselves. The trench which they left is by next day non-existent—even the airmen looking down on it from above in the mists of the grey dawn can scarcely tell where it was. Then some community of ants sets to work and the line begins to show again. Again it is obliterated, until a stage comes when the German decides that it is not worth while digging it out. He has other lines, and he turns his energy on to them.

The result of all this is that areas of ground in the hot corners of battles like that of the Somme and Verdun, and especially disputed hill summits such as the Mort Homme or this Pozieres Ridge, become simply a desert of shell craters.

A few days back, going to a portion of the line which had considerably altered since I was there, I went by a trench which was marked on the map. It was a good trench, but it did not seem to have been greatly used of late, which was rather surprising. "You won't find it quite so good all the way," said a friend who was coming down.

Presently, and quite suddenly, the trench shallowed. The sides which had been clean cut were tumbled in. The fallen earth blocked the passage, and the journey became a switchback over tumbled rubbish and into the trench again. Someone had before been living in the trench, for there were tools in it and bits of soldiers' gear. Here and there a shattered rifle stuck out of the terra-cotta soil. The trench shallowed still further. There had been little hastily scraped dug-outs in the sides of it. They were more than three parts filled with earth; but in them, every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the debris. It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the shell that killed him. It must have been an old German trench taken by our men some weeks before. It can scarcely have been visited since, for its garrison lay there just as the shells had buried them. Probably it had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.

The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a puzzle to say what was trench and what was not. Around one stretched a desert of shell craters—hole bordering upon hole so that there was no space at all between them. Each hole was circular like the ring of earth at the mouth of an ants' nest several thousand times magnified, and they stretched away like the waves of the sea. Far to the left was a bare, brown hill-side. In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.

You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance. But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. In one part of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black, shattered tree stumps. Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding among the craters—clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement. The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen yards farther—a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable there for a short interval. That was certainly the direction.

It was the parapet sure enough. There, waterlogged in earth, were the remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench. A few yards on was another similar barrier. They must have been the British and German barricade built across that sap at the end of some fierce bomb fight, already long-forgotten by the lapse of several weeks. What Victoria Crosses, what Iron Crosses were won there, by deeds whose memory deserved to last as long as the race endures, God only knows—one trusts that the great scheme of things provides some record of such a sacrifice.

Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way. Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially—about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close—a black burst on the brown hill—two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side—a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline—an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are.



One picked the likeliest line, and was ploughing along it, when a bullet hissed not far away. It did not seem probable that there were Germans in the landscape. One looked for another cause. Away to one side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed.

So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole trench, the enemy must still have been holding on. It was a case for keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.

Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard. In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world, to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice, here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position with its wickerwork shell-covers around it—the whole looking like a broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. An officer crawled out to some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.

Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes. "Yes, we were put out there to dig an outpost trench," he said. "The sergeant gave us a wrong direction, I think. We took two days' rations and went out hundreds of yards. No one came near us. There was firing on all sides, and we did not know where we were. Our food was finished—we saw men working—we did not know who they were—but they were English, and we were captured."



CHAPTER XXI

ANGELS' WORK

France, August 28th.

It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozieres Ridge towards Mouquet Farm. Along a good part of the line the troops were back in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in the trenches they had gone out for.

The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down. The artillery Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had turned into bed. The normal early morning gun was sending its normal shell at intervals ranging up the long valley—rattle, rattle, rattle, until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its gun barking too—every now and again the little shell came and spat over the hill-side.

The morning broke very pale and white through the mist—as though the earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling over ground smashed in by the last night's fire—red earth new turned. Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the mist—you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory—not ours. For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines. It came very slowly—the steady, even pace of a funeral. The leader was a man—a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman—who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.

They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly—sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely—the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.

We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days, had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I have of it still—that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one recognised that it was a road, because the banks of it ran straight. It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin—it took you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.

There was a shrapnel shell regularly spitting across that country. We knew we should have to pass it, and one was naturally anxious to be under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business which needed care when the expected shell whizzed over the hill and burst. I ducked.

The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed—ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on until the shelter petered out and the shorter shells were already bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into when you heard them singing towards you—and then we decided to give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea.

A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them.

They were stretcher-bearers—Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke of a barrage on the skyline. And coming straight from it were two little parties each headed by a flag.

We hurried to the place—and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry shells behind them.

I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the shell-bursts how the Germans treated them.

"They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said. "You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery," he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a line of black shell-bursts was fringing the hill. "That's not meant for us."

That understanding, if you can maintain it honourably and trust the enemy to do the same, means everything—everything—to the wounded of both sides. The commander who, sitting safely at his table, condemns his wounded and the enemy's in No Man's Land to death by slow torture without grounds for suspecting trickery, would incur a responsibility such as few men would face the thought of.

Load after load, day and night, mile upon mile in and out of craters across the open and back again—assuredly the Australian stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious amongst his fellow soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.



CHAPTER XXII

OUR NEIGHBOUR

France, October 10th.

There are next to us at present some Scotsmen.

Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian Mountain Batteries and Infantry were their outstanding friends in Gallipoli. In France—the artillery of a certain famous regular division. And the Scotsmen.

It is quite remarkable how the Australian seems to forgather with the Scotsman wherever in France he meets him. You will see them sharing each other's canteens at the base, yarning round each other's camp fires at the front. Wherever the pipers are, there will the Australians be gathered together.

I asked an Australian the other day how it was that he and his mates had struck up such a remarkable friendship with some of these Highland regiments now camped near them. "Well, I think it's their sense of humour," he said.

We looked at him rather hard.

"You see, they can understand our jokes," he said. "They don't seem to take us too serious like."

And I think he had just hit it. The Australian has a habit of pulling his mate's leg, and being on his guard against a leg-pull in return. He has sharpened his conversation against the conversation of his friends from the time he could speak—his uncles are generally to blame for it; they started him on the path of repartee by pulling his legs before those same legs had learnt to walk. As a result he is always sparring in conversation—does not mean to be taken seriously. And the Scotsman, cautious and always on the look-out for a feint, is seldom caught by it. If he is, the chances are he gives it back—with interest.

It is a grim, old, dry variety of humour, and it goes with a wonderful, grim, sturdy nature. Few people here see a Scottish regiment passing without waiting, if they have the time, to watch the last square figure disappear down the road. Many look at the perfect swing of the kilts, and the strong bare knees. For myself I can never take my eyes off their faces. There is a stalwart independence in their strong mouths and foreheads and chins which rivets one's interest. Every face is different from the next. Each man seems to be thinking for himself, and ready to stand up for his own decision against the world. There is a sort of reasoned determination uniting them into a single whole, which, one thinks, must be a very terrible sort of whole to meet in anger.

And it is. The Scotsman is, I think, the most unrelenting fighter that I have come across. The Australian is a most fierce fighter in battle, but he is quite ready to make friends afterwards with his enemy. Once he has taken a German prisoner, he is apt to treat him more liberally than most troops—more so even, I think, than the English soldier—and that is saying a good deal. To the Scotsman, when he escorts his prisoners home, those prisoners are Germans still. He has never forgotten the tremendous losses which Scottish regiments suffered at the beginning of the war. He does not feel kindly towards the men who inflicted them. With the Australian, once the fight is over, the bitterness is left behind. The Scotsman makes prisoners, but he does not make friends.

I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter. He had not been in the Army Service Corps in those days. He was in a certain famous regiment of infantry—joined up in the first weeks of the war as a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once—by some process which I do not now understand—to replace heavy casualties. He was with them through that first winter in their miserable, overflowing apology for a trench. It was a shallow ditch with a wretched parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into the trench over the top of the ground at night—they had actually to approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a marsh—get into it over the parapet, and sit there on the back of the trench until nightfall, sheltered only by the parapet, since the trench was too wet to live in.

At last there came a dawn when the regiment charged, to cover operations elsewhere. They left their ditch, and half-way across No Man's Land John Henderson—it is not his name, but it will do as well as another—John Henderson was hit. He lay out there for a day and a night. A brave officer bandaged him and passed on to others. John Henderson was brought in at last, delirious, with two bullets in him and a heavy rheumatism. He was invalided out of the service, and as soon as he thought himself well enough he came back and enlisted at another place, under another name, in another corps; he could not face his native village if he remained out of it, and at the same time he could not get into the fight again if the authorities knew he had once been invalided. His dread still was that they might find out. He would not ask for his leave, when it became due, for fear of causing inquiries; he preferred to stick it out at the front.

He was as stern against the German after two years as he was on the day when he enlisted. "It's a funny thing," he said to me, "but Ah was no worrying about anything at all that night, when Ah was lying out there wounded, excepting that they might tak me a prisoner. Ah was kind of deleerious, ye know, but there was always just that thought running through ma head. I just prayed to God that He wad tak ma life."

And, oddly, I found that he was of the same mind still.

That spirit makes great fighting men; and the friendship between the Scot and the Australian persisted into the fighting. A Scottish unit has been alongside of the Australians for a considerable time. I was told that an Australian working party, while digging a forward trench, was sniped continually by a German machine-gunner out in front of his own line in a shell-hole. One or two men were hit. The line on the flank of the working party happened to be held by Scottish troops. An officer from the Australians had to visit the Scottish line in order to make some preparations for a forthcoming attack.

He found the Scotsmen there thirsting for that sniper's blood, impatiently waiting for dark in order to go over the parapet and get him—they could scarcely be held back even then, straining like hounds in the leash.

The sniper was bagged later, and his machine-gun. It was a mixed affair, Scottish and Australian; and I believe there was an argument as to which owned the machine-gun.



CHAPTER XXIII

MOUQUET FARM

France, September 7th.

On the same day on which the British took Guillemont and reached Ginchy and Leuze Wood; on the same day on which the French pushed their line almost to Combles; at the same time as the British attacked Thiepval from the front, the Australians, for the fifth time, delivered a blow at the wedge which they have all the while been driving into Thiepval from the back, along the ridge whose crest runs northwards from Pozieres past Mouquet Farm.

It was a heavy punch this time. I cannot tell of all these fierce struggles here—they shall be told in full some day. In the earliest steps towards Mouquet British troops attacked on the Australian flank, and at least once the fighting which they met with was appallingly heavy. Victorians, South Australians, New South Welshmen have each dealt their blow at it. The Australians have been in heavy fighting, almost daily, for six solid weeks; they started with three of the most terrible battles that have ever been fought—few people, even here, realise how heavy that fighting was. Then the tension eased as they struck those first blows northwards. As they neared Mouquet the resistance increased. Each of the last five blows has been stiffer to drive. On each occasion the wedge has been driven a little farther forward. This time the blow was heavier and the wedge went farther.

The attack was made just as a summer night was reddening into dawn. Away to the rear over Guillemont—for the Australians were pushing almost in an opposite direction from the great British attack—the first light of day glowed angrily on the lower edges of the leaden clouds. You could faintly distinguish objects a hundred yards away. Our field guns, from behind the hills, broke suddenly into a tempest of fire, which tore a curtain of dust from the red shell craters carpeting the ridge. A few minutes later the bombardment lengthened, and the line of Queenslanders, Tasmanians and Western Australians rushed for the trenches ahead of them.

On the left, well down the shoulder of the hill towards Thiepval, was the dust-heap of craters and ashes, with odd ends of some shattered timber sticking out of it, which goes by the name of Mouquet Farm. It was a big, important homestead some months ago. To-day it is the wreckage of a log roof, waterlogged in a boundless tawny sea of craters. There is no sign of a trench left in it—the entrances of the dug-outs may be found here and there like rat-holes, about half a dozen of them, behind dishevelled heaps of rubbish. They open into craters now—no doubt each opening has been scratched clear of debris a dozen times. You have to get into some of them by crawling on hands and knees.

The first charge took the Western Australians far beyond the farm. They reached a position two hundred yards farther and started to dig in there. Within an hour or two they had a fairly good trench out amongst the craters well in front of the farm. The farm behind them ought to be solidly ours with such a line in front of it. A separate body of men, some of them Tasmanians, came like a whirlwind on their heels into the farm. The part of the garrison which was lying out in front in a rough line of shell craters found them on top of the craters before they knew that there were British troops anywhere about. They were captured and sent back. The Australians tumbled over the debris into the farm itself.

The fight that raged for two days on this ridge was not one of those in which the enemy put up his hands as soon as our men came on to him. Far on the top of the hill to the right, and in the maze of trenches between, and in the dug-outs of the farm on the left, he was fighting stiffly over the whole front. In the dim light, as the party which was to take the farm rushed into it, a machine-gun was barking at them from somewhere inside that rubbish yard itself. They could hear the bark obviously very close to them, but it was impossible to say where it came from, whether thirty yards away or fifty. They knew it must be firing from behind one of the heaps of rubbish where the entrances of the dug-outs probably were, firing obliquely and to its rear at the men who rushed past it. They chose the heap which seemed most probable, and fired six rifle grenades all at once into it. There was a clatter and dust; the machine-gun went out like a candle. Later they found it lying smashed at the mouth of a shaft there.



The Germans fought them from their rat-holes. When a man peered down the dark staircase shaft, he sometimes received a shot from below, sometimes a rifle grenade fired through a hole in a sandbag barricade, which the Germans had made at the bottom of the stair. Occasionally a face would be seen peering up from below—for they refused to come out—and our men would fling down a bomb or fire a couple of shots. But those on the top of the stair always have the advantage. The Germans were bombed and shot out of entrance after entrance, and at last came up through the only exit left to them. Finding Australians swarming through the place, they surrendered; and the whole garrison of Mouquet Farm was accounted for. Those who were not lying dead in the craters and dust-heap were prisoners. Mouquet Farm was ours, and a line of Australian infantry was entrenching itself far ahead of it.

On the ridge the charge had farther to go. It swarmed over one German trench and on to a more distant one. The Germans fought it from their trench. The rush was a long one, and the German had time to find his feet after the bombardment. But the men he was standing up to were the offshoot of a famous Queensland regiment; and, though the German guardsmen showed more fight than any Germans we have met, they had no match for the fire of these boys. The trench is said to have been crowded with German dead and wounded. On the left the German tried at once to bomb his way back into the trench he had lost, and for a time he made some headway. Part of the line was driven out of the trench into the craters on our side of it. But before the bombing party had gone far, the Queenslanders were into the trench again with bomb and bayonet, and the trenches on the right flank of the attack were solidly ours.

The Queenslanders who reached this trench and took it, found themselves looking out over a wide expanse of country. Miles in front of them, and far away to their flank, there stretched a virgin land. They were upon the crest of the ridge, and the landscape before them was the country behind the German lines. Except for a gentle rise, somewhat farther northward behind Thiepval, they had reached about the highest point upon the northern end of the ridge.

The connecting trenches, between Mouquet Farm and the ridge above and behind it, were attacked by the Tasmanians. The fire was very heavy, and for a moment it looked as if this part of the line, and the Queenslanders immediately next to it, would not be able to get in. Officer after officer was hit. Leading amongst these was a senior captain, an officer old for his rank, but one who was known to almost every man in the force as one of the most striking personalities in Gallipoli. He had two sons in the Australian force, officers practically of his own rank. He was one of the first men on to Anzac Beach; and was the last Australian who left it: Captain Littler.

I had seen him just as he was leaving for the fight, some hours before. He carried no weapon but a walking-stick. "I have never carried anything else into action," he said, "and I am not going to begin now." He was ill with rheumatism and looked it, and the doctor had advised that he ought not to be with his company. But he came back to them that evening for the fight; and one could see that it made a world of difference to them. He was a man whom his own men swore by. Personally, one breathed more easily knowing that he was with them. It would be his last big fight, he told me.

Half-way through that charge, in the thick of the whirl of it, he was seen standing, leaning heavily upon his stick. It was touch and go at the moment whether the trench was won or lost. "Are you hit, sir?" asked several around him. Then they noticed a gash in his leg and the blood running from it—and he seemed to be hit through the chest as well.

"I will reach that trench if the boys do," he said.

"Have no fear of that, sir," was the answer. A sergeant asked him for his stick. Then—with the voice of a big man, like his officer, the sergeant shouted, and waved his stick, and took the men on. In the half-dark his figure was not unlike that of his commander. They made one further rush and were in the trench.

They were utterly isolated in the trench when they reached it. A German machine-gun was cracking away in the same trench to their right, firing between them and the trench they had come from. There was barbed wire in front of it. When they tried to force a way with bombs up the trench to the gun, German bombers in craters behind the trench showered bombs on to them. Then a sergeant crawled out between the wire and the machine-gun—crawled on his stomach right up to the gun and shot the gunner with his revolver. "I've killed three of them," he said, as he crawled back. Presently a shell fell on him and shattered him. But our bombers, like the Germans, crept out into craters behind the trench, and bombed the German bombers out of their shelter. That opened the way along the trench, and they found the three machine-gunners, shot as the sergeant had said. The Tasmanians went swiftly along the trench after that, and presently saw a row of good Australian heads in a sap well in front of them. There went up a cheer. Other German guardsmen, who had been lying in craters in front of the trench, and in a scrap of trench beyond, heard the cheering; seeing that there were Australians on both sides of them, they stumbled to their feet and threw up their hands. They were marched off to the rear, and the Tasmanians joined up with the Queenslanders.