But only the Westralians were really home, and some of these had two or three hundred miles to go; for the rest of us there was still a fortnight more in the old ship as we sailed across the base of Australia to the eastern States.



CHAPTER XXX

IN AUSTRALIA

When the ship drew in at the Melbourne wharf I made up my mind to escape the fuss and hero-worship, as I was a Queenslander and knew that none of my folks were among the crowd waiting at the gates. I went to the military landing-officer and asked him if I could not go out another way and dodge the procession. He said the orders were that every officer and man was to be driven in special cars to the hospital. I then went down onto the wharf and approached one of the ladies who looked as if she would play the game and I said to her: "If I ride in your car, will you promise to do me a favor?" She said: "I would do anything for you." I then said: "Well, let me out as soon as we get outside the gate." She demurred a good deal but I reminded her that no Australian girl I knew ever broke a promise. When we got outside I boarded a tram-car, which had not gone far before it had to stop to let the procession pass. Of course, every one would see that I was a returned soldier, but there was nothing to show that I was just returned. I stood up in the tram-car with the rest of the passengers and cheered and threw cigarettes and remarked loudly to all and sundry: "Some more boys come back, eh?" But my well-laid plans were entirely spoiled as my friends in the automobile called put, "Here, Knyvett, you dog, come out of that! Here's your place!" and I disgracefully subsided with many blushes, and had to endure all the way up to Melbourne the whispers and concentrated gaze of the whole tramful. I also "fell in" in another way, for when I rang up my uncle I found that he and his daughter were looking for me down at the wharf gates.

Two years ago the site of Caulfield Hospital was a wilderness of weeds and sand. Now it is an area of trim lawns and blazing gardens, bowling-greens, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts, with comfortable huts, the gift of the people of Melbourne to their wounded soldiers, costing several hundred thousand dollars. As I had served with Victorian troops I was assigned to this hospital, although my home was over a thousand miles away in the northern state of Queensland. All who were fit to travel were given fourteen days "disembarkation leave" to visit their homes, but twelve of these days I had to spend in travel and only had two days at home after such long absence.

My wounds had healed but I was still paralyzed in my left leg, and the only attention I required was daily massage for an hour, and then another hour in the torture-chamber with an electric current grilling me. After this was over, I would go into the city, do the block, have afternoon tea, give an address at the Town Hall recruiting-depot, go to a theatre, and then as there seemed nothing else to be done, would return to the hospital. Such was my programme for ninety days. Sometimes I varied it by visiting the Zoo to commiserate with the wild animals on being caged.

There were many red-letter days when I was entertained by friends; but I am afraid I only squeaked when they expected roars—to be lionized was too unusual not to have stage fright a little.

The women in Australia are well organized and see to it that if a boy has a dull time it's his own fault. All the automobiles of the city were registered with the Volunteer Motor Corps, and each day certain of them were allotted to take wounded soldiers for picnics. We would generally be driven to some pretty suburb and there would be spread before us a feast of good things. At the end of the meal some of us felt like the little boy who said to his mother after the party: "I'm so tired, mummie, carry me up-stairs to bed, but don't bend me!"

There were concerts every night for the stay-at-home, but I only managed to get to one, given by the pupils of Madam Melba, which was a feast of harmony. After the programme refreshments were brought round by V. A. D.'s, whom the boys called, "Very Artful Dodgers," but it was not the "Thank you for the cakes and tea!" that they dodged! We had a cricket-match, one-armers versus one-leggers, and we one-leggers were allowed to catch the ball in our hats; but the one-leggers lost as we were nearly all run out. Some of us being half-way down the pitch as the ball was thrown in, would throw one crutch at the wickets, knocking off the bails, when the umpire, who had no legs at all, would give his decision that we were "stumped."

A huge Red Cross carnival was held near the hospital which netted about fifty thousand dollars. We were guests of honor, and on this occasion in the enormous crowds found "Long John" (one of the doctors, who was seven feet tall) very useful. He wondered why he was being followed about by several girls whom he did not know. We explained to him afterward that a good number of us who had "meets" had thought out the ingenious scheme of telling the girl to meet us at "Long John," who would be the tallest object on the grounds. We told him that he didn't play the game properly by moving about so much, as our friends complained that they were just worn out following him round.

The carnival was one enormous fair—there were row on row of stalls, decorated in the colors of all the Allied flags, with the girls serving at them dressed in peasant costumes. The goods on the needlework-stalls represented the work of weeks—there were flower-stalls, sweet-stalls, produce-stalls, book-stalls, and in and out of the crowds girls went selling raffle-tickets for everything under the sun—from tray-cloths to automobiles and trips to Sydney. Ballyhoo-men stood at tent-doors, calling the crowd to come and see the performing kangaroo, the wild man from Borneo, or, "Every time you hit him you get a good cigar!" "Him" was a grinning black face stuck obligingly through a hole in a sheet. There were groups of tables and chairs under bright-colored umbrellas, every here and there, where good things to eat were served all day. The fun lasted well into the night, when there were concerts, and dancing, and even the one-legged men tried to dance.

I don't think I had any other meals at the hospital than breakfast which I always had in bed. There was an orderly officer who was very unpopular as he had been months round the hospital and missed many chances of going to the front. One day the men played a trick on him. When he came into the dining-room to ask if there were any complaints one of them picked up a dish which was steaming hot and said: "Look here, sir! What do you think of this?" He picked up a spoon and tasted it. "Why, my man, that's very good soup! You're lucky to get such good food." "But, sir, it's not soup, it's dish-water!" (Curtain.)

At last the Medical Board sat on my case and their decision left me gasping for breath, for they recommended that I be discharged as permanently unfit for further military service. But nature sometimes plays sorry pranks with medical decisions. Not more than a week after this, movement suddenly returned to my leg and I threw away my crutches and was able to walk almost as well as ever. About ten days after leaving hospital I had sailed back for France via America, but have not at the time of writing been able to get across the Atlantic.



CHAPTER XXXI

USING AN IRISHMAN'S NERVE

I have been saving this for a separate chapter; for besides a natural hesitation in admitting that I am not "all there," I want to have sufficient space in which to express my gratitude to the doctor who performed the operation and to the "unknown" who had his leg amputated, so providing me with a portion of his anatomy that I was in sore need of. Of course, in these days when surgical miracles are happening continually there is nothing outstanding about this operation, and surgeons have wonderful opportunities in a military hospital, where there are so many spare human parts lying about to patch up a man with. I quite believe that from three smashed men they could make a whole one, which, after all, would not be such a marvel when one remembers that they are continually grafting bones and nerves, and I for one would not like to say that in the next war they may not be able to cure a man who has lost his head entirely, and as a matter of fact, one of the San Francisco papers informed its readers (and as in this country the impossible of yesterday happens to-day, no doubt they believed it to be true) that I had had another man's leg grafted onto me. After such a statement it is an anti-climax to have to inform the public that it was only a portion of nerve that was grafted.

I had been lying in hospital several weeks before I got worried about the fact that I could not move my leg. Then when the great-hearted, plain-faced doctor who was attending to me said, "How's the man of many wounds this morning?" I asked: "Why is it my leg is dead?" He said: "We're only waiting for the wounds to heal until we test it." And sure enough a day or two later I was put in the electric chair for "reactions." When the current was put onto my right leg I howled and twisted, but with twice the current on my left leg nothing happened, as I felt nothing. Some days later a great nerve specialist operated on me and when I came back to this workaday world from the land of fancy, whither the ether had borne me, I was informed that a portion of nerve had been grafted in my leg and that in about three months I might be able to use it.

At this time I had no idea from whom the portion of nerve came. I did not like to inquire, for I was afraid that if I met its previous owner I might be prejudiced against it. Every portion of one's body is so closely related to the rest that I was afraid if his face did not suit my fancy I might subconsciously come to resemble him. But whenever I met one-legged men in the corridors or concert-hall I would try to pick out the one I would most like to receive such an intimate gift from. Some of these had a refined, delicate appearance, and I immediately feared that I would grow tenderfooted, while others looked like pugilists and I immediately imagined my foot was becoming calloused and might become longer than the other.

So purposely I remained in ignorance of the religion and nationality of my new nerve. Once for a whole day I sweat blood lest it might be a German, and then I plucked up courage to ask if there were any Germans in the hospital, and when I learned that there were not I slept like a child for many hours. On Saturdays I felt it might be a Jew or a Seventh-Day Adventist, but then it did not work on other days either, so I thought it must be I. W. W., "I Won't Work" as they are called in Australia. Then one day I was sure it was from one of the same religion as myself, for that leg was perspiring alone, and in the outback country in Australia, where the temperature reaches one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, the Presbyterian Church is sometimes called "Perspiration." At any rate, I read in a paper that in one town the three churches were Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Perspiration. As to nationality it might be Scotch, as I had to be "verra cautious" in moving it, or English, being so "sensitive" to the touch. It was only after movement returned that I was quite sure it was Irish! For ever since then the Home Rule controversy has been going on in my body, for when I want to place my foot in a certain position, it's bound to try and go some other way. You can see from all this that I don't know much about nerves, and I even wonder sometimes whether, if they put in my leg a nerve from an arm, I might not try to shake hands with it like the armless man in the circus, or, if it happened to belong to the opposite leg, whether or not I would be pigeon-toed.

I sometimes wonder if the donor of this piece of nerve still "feels it" in his own leg, for, months after a man has lost his leg, he still feels it there. There was one man in the hospital who had lost both legs and screamed with pain every night because his toes were twisted, and it was only when they had dug up his feet and straightened out his toes that he got rest.

There are nerves and nerves, and I am sure that the grafting in me of this piece from the nerves of an Irishman has given to me more nerve than I ever had in my life before, else how could I have written this book?



PART VI

MEDITATIONS IN THE TRENCHES



CHAPTER XXXII

THE RIGHT INFANTRY WEAPONS

I know scores of men who have been months in the trenches and over the top in several attacks who have never fired a shot out of their rifles. In fact, it is very, very rarely that the man in the trenches gets a chance to aim at an enemy at a greater range than a hundred yards. There are thousands of men whom I know who believe that the long-range rifles used in our army to-day are useless weapons. A much more serviceable gun to repel a counter-attack would be one firing buckshot like a pump-gun. The bullets from our high-velocity rifles frequently pass through the body of a man at a close range and he is not even conscious of having been hit and continues to come on with as great fury as before. The pellets scattering from a shotgun at a range of a hundred yards or less would do him more damage and be far more certain to stop him. In an actual charge our present rifle is more than useless—it is an encumbrance, and when at grips with the enemy in his own trenches it is often a fatal handicap. With a bayonet at the end it is far too long, and in a trench two to four feet wide it cannot be used with much effect. I have known our men repeatedly to unship the bayonet and take it in their hands, throwing the rifle away. Another danger is that men will fire their rifles down an enemy trench and these high-velocity bullets will pass right through the bodies of the one or two of the enemy in front of him and frequently kill his own comrade beyond. Remember, in a fight in a trench friend and foe are mixed up together and many of our men have been unconsciously shot by their fellows. In every regiment a small squad of picked marksmen only should have these long-range rifles, with the addition of telescopic sights. The average man does not take exact aim before firing, and nearly all the shots go high. If it were not for bombs and machine-guns the enemy could always succeed in getting to our trenches with very little loss. It should be remembered, too, how closely, in an attack, we follow our own barrage—it is impossible to see to fire through it.

The system of barrage fighting that we now use has made warfare as much a hand-to-hand business as it was in olden times and we must go back a good deal to old-fashioned weapons, as we have to a great extent to old-fashioned armor. The picked snipers or sharpshooters could be placed in points of vantage to pick off any of the enemy who exposed themselves and a score of them in each company would get very few shots in a day.

Another weapon that infantry should be armed with is a hand-bayonet as there is no advantage whatever in the long reach that our present rifle and bayonet gives. As a matter of fact, many of our men have been killed through driving their bayonet too far into the body of their opponent, not being able to draw it out, thus being helpless when attacked by another of the enemy. It is no use telling men not to drive their bayonet in more than three or four inches, for in the speed and fury of a charge they will always drive it in right up to the hilt, and while we retain this out-of-date weapon we should certainly put a guard on it not further than six inches from the point. I have used a hand-bayonet which sticks out from the fist like a knuckle-duster and is about six inches long. The shock of the blow is taken on the forearm which also has an iron plate running down it on which to receive the thrust of one's opponent. This is the natural weapon for the Anglo-Saxon, as the fist and arm is used exactly as in boxing. If an enemy comes at you with a bayonet it is the natural and easy thing to throw up your arm and ward it off. The iron plate saves your arm being cut; you are in under his guard; seize his rifle with your left hand and punch with your right, driving the knife home the six inches, which is all that is necessary. I have been in and seen a number of bayonet charges and I am quite satisfied that the parries and thrusts that we teach the infantryman are only of value to get him used to handling his rifle. After that it would be a good thing for him to forget them.

There are only two things that it is essential to remember when you go into a bayonet charge. The first is that the most determined man will win. I have known champion men-at-arms killed by a bayonet in their first charge and other little fellows who were no good in the practice combats kill their man every time. If you go into a bayonet charge with the idea of disarming your opponent and taking him prisoner you will most certainly be killed. But if you are quite sure in your own mind that you are going to kill every man who comes against you, you will do it. Your determination impresses itself upon the man you attack and he will be beaten before you reach him. The other thing that it is wise to remember is to make your opponent attack you on your left side. If he attacks you on the right you have to parry him and then thrust, but for an attack on the left side the action of parrying will bring the toe of your butt into his jaw or ribs, disabling him, and it is a good thing to use your knee at the same time.

The general-staff officers who decide how an army should be weaponed never do the actual fighting and few junior officers or men feel competent to offer their advice. I am quite confident that a majority of the fighters would agree with the foregoing opinions, and I would like the chance of taking a company armed as I have suggested into action, and would be quite satisfied of their superiority to any troops on the front.



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FORCING-HOUSE OF BESTIALITY

The Germans have given to us an illustration, though such was not needed by thinking men to convince them of its truth, of the fact that the beast in humanity only requires encouragement to make us more bestial than any wild thing of the jungle or even the filthy cur of the streets. If any man takes as his guiding principle the devilish doctrine that the "end justified the means" he will soon become a menace to his fellows and any good impulses that he may originally have will pass away. The German Government made savagery, brutality, and bestiality a deliberate policy, and now it is their unconscious impulse. Germany is paying a terrible penalty in the degradation and demoralization of her whole people for having given the direction of the country into the hands of the Devil in exchange for power, and the German army is to-day a forcing-house for bestiality and there is no atmosphere in the whole world that so conduces to evil. In the beginning of the war letters and statements of prisoners showed that there were then many decent Germans who were horrified at the abominations they had seen and committed at the command of their government. But latterly, you cannot find any trace of this feeling. Now they gloat over it.

There is no one in the world to-day except those who are of like mind who do not know that the story of the German atrocities is true, for Germany has admitted enough crimes to convince any sane man that she would stick at nothing. No action could be too cruel, no deed too beastly, no torture too diabolical, no insult too keen, no impulse too filthy, no disfigurement too hideous, no vandalism too shocking, no destruction too complete, no stooping too low that Germany would hesitate to do where she has opportunity. When Germany boasted of the murder by drowning of women and babes on the high seas she proclaimed to the world that she was a criminal, and we do not need to have any other crimes proven to convince us that, while there is such a thing as justice, she must not go unpunished.

Criminals have been forgiven, but not before they are repentant; Safety, as well as Justice, demands that the murderer, the assassin, the raper shall not go free. Germany has not only committed all these crimes, but her theologians and professors have condoned them. The man who counsels forgiveness to Germany adds hypocrisy to the will to commit the same crimes. To forgive, we are told, is divine, but the Divine does not forgive without repentance. Has Germany shown signs of repentance yet? Well, then, the man who talks of forgiveness to Germany before she is on her knees begging for forgiveness is an enemy of peace and a condoner of crime.

It is so easy for those who have not suffered to tell the victims "to forgive." We do not go in nightly dread lest in the morning we should have to rake among the ruins of our homes for the mangled body of our baby! We do not have to work in daily fear lest we should have to return to an empty house whence wife or daughter have been dragged by brutal hands! For three years the people of London and Paris and thousands of other cities have never known but that at any moment their house might be brought down in ruins about their ears, entombing all that they hold dear! For three years the men of northern France and Belgium have never known but that while they were working, under compulsion, against the life of their own blood and country in a German munition factory, some soldiers might not be calling at their homes to take the woman that they love God alone knows where! These very things have happened to tens of thousands. Week after week the human hawks come over London, and ever the toll of civilians and women and babies done to death grows larger! One hundred thousand young girls were taken from Lille and other cities away from knowledge or protection of their kin, and until recently we had no news of any of them, but some have been thrown into Switzerland, of no further use to Germany; used up like sucked lemons, they are cast aside for the Swiss to feed. Germany has in her maw to-day more than ten millions of slaves.

In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me: "There is a baby coming; it is a boche; when it is born I will cut its throat!" A woman showed me on an estaminet floor the blood-stains of her own baby butchered before her eyes. These were French women, not ours. But what if they had been? Your sister! Your mother! Your wife! And they might have been but for the accident of geography. Would you then have felt as bitter as these people? Or would you still have kindly feelings to Germany and not want to "humiliate her." There may be beings who could see daughter violated or brother mutilated without taking personal vengeance, but such should not be permitted to breathe the air with MEN.

The only people who have a right to say what punishment shall be meted out to Germany for her misdeeds, are the women of France, of Belgium, of Poland, of Serbia, of Rumania, of Italy, who have suffered these things; and if any one, King or President, Parliament or Pope, dares stand between these people and their just wrath they deserve to be pilloried in the minds of men as condoners of crime, as accessories after the fact.

The only chance for permanent peace, and guarantee that these abominable crimes shall not be committed again, is that we should so punish Germany that she shall realize "that war does not pay," and that the whole earth may know that no nation can commit these atrocities and go unpunished.



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR

The observation of men in many circumstances of peril has quite convinced me that it is those who are most afraid that do the bravest deeds. I do not mean that the fact that they are afraid increases the difficulty of the doing, because it lessens it. It is fear that drives men to heroism! And many a man attempts the superhuman feat of courage not to show to others that he is no coward, but as evidence in the court of his own judgment, to disprove the accusations of conscience, which asserts he is craven. The old illustration of one soldier who accused another of having no bravery because he had no fear, by saying, "If you were as much afraid as I am you would have run away long ago," is not true to life, for it is the man of dulled feelings that is the first to run, and the "man who is afraid of being afraid" who stays at his post to the last. I have ever found that the best scouts, men who must generally work alone in the dark, are those of highly strung nervous temperaments. I have noticed, too, that our best airmen were of the same type, for if you go into any mess of pilots on the front you will see them always fidgeting, their hands never still, betraying nervousness. I have gone down the trench before a charge and seen the men with teeth chattering and blanched faces, but at the appointed second these men go over the top, none hesitating, every man performing prodigies of valor; not one but was a hero, yet not one that was not afraid.

There must be something wrong with the make-up of a man who under modern artillery-fire is not afraid. There are no nerves that do not break down eventually under the strain, but the man who shrinks from a shadow, and shudders at the touch of cold mud does his job with care and walks unhesitatingly into the mouth of hell. I have seen our signallers mending the telephone-wire under fire; each time it would break they would curse and tremble, but immediately go out and repair it accurately, slowly, no skimped work, repeating the performance again and again. There is in our spirit some reserve force which on occasion the will uses to stiffen resolution—the second wind of determination.

Fear is the "purgative of the soul"! There is nothing so wholesome for a man as to be "scared to death"! Nothing that so drives out the littlenesses that poison his life and set up the toxaemia of selfishness. Many a man that before the war made the acquiring of wealth or the gaining of the plaudits of his friends his chief aim, now finds that these things have no appeal for him. For he has been to the edge of life and looked into the abyss, and fear has stripped from him the rags of self-adornment; and standing naked between the worlds his soul has found that it needs no beautifying but the cleansing of self-forgetfulness.

This war is one of the greatest blessings this world has ever known, for it has brought to us fear of selfish force, fear of the engines of our own construction, fear of isolation in world politics, fear of secret diplomacy, fear of an unguarded peace, fear of an unprepared future, fear of an undisciplined people, fear of an irresponsible government, and, above all THE FEAR OF FORGETTING!

But there is another reason why a man in battle, though afraid, does not fail. The fact is that men in a regiment or an army are not under the domination of their own will at all, but of the collective will of the whole. That is why some regiments are so anxious to keep alive their traditions, and emblazon their battles on their colors. That is why we devote so much time in the training of young recruits to the knowledge of the esprit de corps of the regiment. That is why the regulars are always the best fighters. It is not their longer training, for that is a handicap with new methods of warfare. It is not because of their superior discipline, for the territorials have not lacked perfect discipline. But there is an atmosphere in the regular regiments that makes one brother that goes into the regulars a better soldier than the other that enlists in militia. This atmosphere is compounded of pride in past achievements and confidence that the colors that have never been lowered, though shot down on many a field, cannot be shamed to-day. The victors of many engagements have an enormous advantage in battle. No one expected anything but the most heroic courage from the British regulars who had never failed when called upon, but every one was not a little anxious how "Kitchener's" would stand their first ordeal of fire.

Every mass of men has, besides the will and mind of each one of them, a collective will and mind. Every town has this—who has not felt, on entering a town and viewing its shops and people, a certain pushing toward behavior—some towns tend to make one frivolous, others grave. I know a city which, every time I enter, makes me think when last I was in church, while there is another in which I always want to dance or view the Follies. Have you not seen countrymen in town, whose clothes proclaim that they have never been out later than nine o'clock in a lifetime, trying to be the gay Lothario, drinking wine in a cabaret? Every house has its personality made up of the collective minds of the people who inhabit it. Take your child to one strange house and he will fidget uncomfortably on the edge of his chair; but take him to another, just as strange, and he will romp about without hesitation. Children are like the canaries we use to detect the presence of poisonous gases, most sensitive to atmosphere.

In the same way an army has ONE WILL, and that is why in battle you will not see one man fail, or there will be panic and all will fail. In every army there are individual men weak in resolution who, left to themselves, would run away; but as the MIND of the army as a whole is courageous, so they are swept along in spite of themselves. The German army has ONE MIND for bestiality, and the Allied army has ONE MIND for victory.



CHAPTER XXXV

THE SPLENDOR OF THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY

To those who are thrilled by the old-time tales of adventurous chivalry or moved by the narrative of high endeavor and heroic achievement for some noble ideal, I bring a conception of the marvellous glory of these present days. We have been wont to sing of the times when thousands left home and comfort on a Holy Crusade, but the Crusaders of these days are numbered in millions.

Never were there such stirring times as these, never since the first tick of time have the hours been so crowded! Never before did so many men live nobly or die bravely. The young knights from many lands are seeking the Holy Grail, and finding it in forgetfulness of self and in sacrifice for their fellows. You and I are living to-day among the deeds of men that make the deeds of the heroes of past times pale into insignificance. Never were there bred men of such large and heroic mould as the men of to-day.

Here's a trench—on which a shell falls—and where one shell falls another always follows in the same place;—the shell blows in a dugout and there is little chance that the men sheltering therein shall be alive, yet those on either side, knowing that another shell will fall in a second or so, in utter forgetfulness of self leap in and with their bare fingers scrape away the dirt lest haply there should be some life yet remaining in this quivering, mangled human flesh.

Oh! What chances the men of earth have to-day to be as God! The highest conception any religion has given us of God is that he is one that would sacrifice himself—"Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends"—and to-day they're doing it by the million. Every moment is adding names to the honor-roll of heaven of men who follow in His steps.

Have you conceived that the uniting together of the nations that love peace in this struggle will do more to guarantee peace in the future than anything else that has ever happened in world politics,—that it will join France, Britain, and America into a trinity of free peoples who will prevent war, at least for many generations? We are being bound together by the strongest tie that ever tied nation to nation, that ever bound one people to another, not by political treaties that may be torn up, but by the great tie of common blood shed in a common cause on a common soil. That narrow lane that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is the great international cemetery, and for many generations it will be the Mecca of pilgrimages from all our countries. The wreaths of America will mingle with the immortelles of France and the flowers from Britain and the pilgrims shall there get to know, understand, and love each other as they engage in the holy task of paying a common tribute to their common dead. Shall not the mingling blood of Frenchmen, Britons, and Americans make the flowers of peace to grow? They never had such soil before.

There is being created, also, in all our countries a new aristocracy—the aristocracy of courage. We never had a chance up till now to prove who were our real, our best people, and we have been accustomed to measure our citizens by the false and small standards of wealth, birth, and intellect. Well! There has been given to us to-day a new standard whereby we can measure ourselves, the standard of courage, sacrifice, and service. Nobody in England cares to-day whether you are descended from William the Conqueror or not! No one will care in America whether your ancestor came over in the Mayflower, or whether he signed the Declaration of Independence! Every American has a chance to-day of signing a far greater declaration than that great one of '76—the declaration of personal willingness to sacrifice all on the altar of liberty. In England, in America, in Australia, in all the countries of the world in the days that are to be, men and women will make their boast in this one thing, or have no cause for boasting at all, of the part that they had in this fight, the greatest fight that has ever been waged for liberty, for righteousness, and for the virtue of womanhood.

What a splendid opportunity it is for us to be able to personally pay the price of liberty. How easy to forget that freedom has either to be earned by ourselves or enjoyed because some one else has paid the price for us. Had we not forgotten in our countries that the democracy that we boast of is no credit to us because it was won by the blood of other men? Men died that we might be able to govern ourselves! Women carried heart-ache and loneliness to the grave that we might make our own laws!

Liberty! Such an easy word to mouth, but how precious in the sight of God! Liberty is one of the treasures of heaven and only committed to men at great cost, lest they should undervalue it.

In these great and wonderful times there has been given to us the glorious opportunity to earn our own liberty, to prove our own personal right to citizenship in a free country.

You may not be able to pay in good, red blood, you may not be able to pay much in the coin of the republic, but if each of us does not pay in whatsoever coin we have, there will come soon to us the days in which we shall realize that we are thieves and robbers, enjoying that to which we have no right, won so hardly with the deaths and wounds of men and the salt tears of women. In the New World that shall be born after the birth-pangs of the present days, we shall realize that we have no place, our souls shall shrink and shrivel as we gaze on the honor scars of those who have paid, and we shall be elbowed to the outskirts of the crowd, as the people bow before the men whom the President and people delight to honor—the men sightless, the men limbless, the memory of the men lifeless.



CHAPTER XXXVI

NOT A FIGHT FOR "RACE" BUT FOR "RIGHT"

I have no patience with the waterish sentiment that suggests that the lines of the Germans in America and Australia have fallen in hard places because they are called upon to take up arms against their own blood. For this is not a war of race, but of right! It is not a war of Britons, Americans, and French against Germans and Austrians! It is a war of men in all nations against beasts!

There is something in all of us that is stronger than kinship, higher than citizenship—manhood—and every one who is a man, though he be of German blood will join us in this struggle against the monster that has devoured women and children and many fair lands.

We have in the Australian army one general of German blood, another of Austrian, and hundreds of men of both, but they have been fighting loyally with us, because they were men and could not be held back from striking at tyranny and wrong. Remember, in the Australian army all are volunteers.

Every one now knows what Germany stands for and the menace she is to the future of the world if her power is not destroyed, and every one who does not help to defeat her is an ally of the Kaiser and helping him to win the war.

The Judge is to-day separating the sheep from the goats, not according to nationality, but according to how they stand in this strife for right, for never was there a cause so divinely right as the cause of the Allies, and never a cause so devilishly wrong as that of the Germans.

The great mass of the German people have shown themselves to be on the side of evil, but every German in our own countries is given a chance in the present days to prove himself a man who hates brutality and cruelty and wrong, or by standing aloof from helping us show that he has the will to do these things as his kinsman in France. These should be given the same medicine as the Kaiser's millions "over there." We should also root out the Kaiser's secret allies in our midst, some of them not of German blood, who for pay do his dirty work, never forgetting also that the neutral and the lukewarm at this present juncture are also our enemies and have their hands stained with the blood of our kin who die for this cause.

Washington when he called on the English colonists in this country to resist the German mercenaries of the German King of England did not bewail the fate that compelled them to fight against their own country and where their kin dwelt. No! For his cause was just and just-minded men must support it though a sword pierced their own hearts.

Lincoln when he called on the people of the Northern States to free the slaves did not exempt those who had friends or kin down South, but he called on every one who was free to strike a blow for the freedom of other men, though in so doing they should be cutting off their own right arms.

In this war we are not only fighting to free millions who are held in a far worse slavery than ever the negro was in, but we are fighting for our own liberty and that of our children, which has been directly attacked. Not all Germans are bestial and cruel, with no regard for honor, but just how many of them are not remains for the American and Australian citizens of German descent to prove.

Not all Britishers and Americans and Frenchmen are willing to sacrifice themselves in our righteous cause—there are traitors even here, and these I would rather shoot than the enemy in France.

There never was a more damnable doctrine promulgated on the face of the earth than that of "My country, right or wrong." Free men could never subscribe to such a doctrine. We have no right to call upon people to take up arms because the government has declared war, but because the government was right in declaring war. Those who oppose the government in this are not traitors to a party or a majority, but traitors to the country and to right.

The two great camps in which the world is divided to-day will be known in history as those who loved liberty more than life and those who loved dominion more than right. Maybe the names of the races will be forgotten but the memory of the opposing principles will abide.



CHAPTER XXXVII

"KEEPING FAITH WITH THE DEAD"

While here and there politicians grow faint-hearted, the army fights on with cheerfulness. It would be a cure for pessimism of the deepest black to go to the trenches for a while. There all is cheery optimism, no doubt at all about the final outcome, and no talk of peace. I have never heard one man in the army talk or hint of peace or dream of it, for they know that it cannot be yet. The only people who shall declare peace will be the army—no politicians, no parliament, or government—for the army to-day is a citizen army and large enough to change any government that is weak-kneed, and they shall allow parliament to grant peace only when they are ready, and that shall not be until we have gained a certain victory.

Prime Minister Lloyd George gave us three words over a year ago that are still the beacon-lights of the army, and we shall not reach port unless they are our guiding lights. They were reparation, restoration, and guarantees, and anything less would be a betrayal of France and Belgium and an insult to the wounded and a defaming of the dead.

The army and people of the allied countries have already paid too much not to have the goods delivered.

Do you think, for example, that we Australian boys are going back to our country without having gained that for which we came these twelve thousand miles and have fought so long, and lost so much?

Do you think that I am going back to Australia well and sound to face the mothers of my scouts, and when they come and ask me how their boys died, I will have to say; "Well! Here I am, well and strong, still able to put up a fight, and your son lies over there, his bones rotting on a foreign soil, and all in vain. The blood of him who to you was more precious than any prince or king that ever lived has been poured out like water and uselessly"?

Listen! Here is something of what Australia has paid. There has never been a day for three years that hundreds of Australian wives have not been made widows. There has not been a single week that there has not been more than a full page of casualties in our daily papers. Every woman in Australia if she has not seen there the name of her near kin has seen the name of some one that she knows. I know a father and five sons that have all been killed. Within fifty miles of one town that I know there is not a man under fifty years of age. There are ranches and farms that will go back to the primeval wilderness, the fences will rot and fall down, and the rabbits and kangaroos will overrun them again, because the men who were developing them are gone and there are none to take their places. Never was there a country so starved for men, and sixty thousand are gone forever or maimed for life. Tell me, where are we going to replace these men? No country in the world could so ill afford to lose its young men, the future fathers of the race, for we have still our pioneering to do, a continent larger than the United States, with about the population of New York.

Outside our Australian cities there are some large cemeteries, as we mostly have only one for each city, but the largest of our cemeteries does not lie on Australian soil. There are more Australian dead buried in Egypt than in any cemetery in our own country. On Gallipoli, in enemy hands, are the graves of thousands of our sacred dead. There are more of our unburied dead whitening in No Man's Land in France than have ever been laid to rest by reverent hands in a God's acre at home. Think of all that we have paid in blood and tears and heartache. But, perhaps, more than this has been paid in pain and sweat. Many have been in those trenches more than three years. Consider their sufferings! The unnatural life, like rats in a hole, the nerve-strain, the insufficient food, the scanty clothing. What we have paid, Canada has paid, South Africa has paid, but Britain and France, how much more! And Belgium, and Serbia, and Poland, and Rumania, and Italy. What a price to pay for an insecure peace, an enemy still with power to harm.

We might erect to our fallen dead the most magnificent monument that this world has ever seen, we might built it in marble, and stud it with gems, and have the greatest poets and artists decorate it, but it would be a mockery and a sham.

The only monument that we dare erect to our fallen dead, the only monument that would not be a dishonor to them and a shame and eternal disgrace to us is THE MONUMENT OF VICTORY.

And the army will never quit until we have sure victory, for we dare not break faith with our dead.

These lines of a Canadian soldier, Colonel McCrae, who has made the last sacrifice are an epitome of the army's spirit:

"In Flanders' fields the poppies grow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, While in the sky the larks, Still bravely singing, Fly unheard amid the guns. We are the Dead— Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow, Loved and were loved—and now we lie In Flanders' fields——

Take up our quarrel with the foe. To you from failing hands we throw The torch—be yours to bear it high— If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep though poppies grow In Flanders' fields."



BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE

By Leslie Coulson, killed in action

Our little hour—how swift it flies When poppies flare and lilies smile; How soon the fleeting minute dies, Leaving us but a little while To dream our dream, to sing our song To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower, The Gods—they do not give us long— One little hour.

Our little hour—how short it is When Love with dew-eyed loveliness Raises her lips for ours to kiss And dies within our first caress. Youth flickers out like windblown flame, Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour, For Time and Death, relentless, claim One little hour.

Our little hour,—how short a time To wage our wars, to fan our fates, To take our fill of armored crime, To troop our banner, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped One little hour?

Our little hour—how soon it dies; How short a time to tell our beads, To chant our feeble Litanies, To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds, The altar lights grow pale and dim, The bells hang silent in the tower, So passes with the dying hymn, Our little hour.



BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE

By Leslie Coulson, killed in action

Our little hour—how swift it flies When poppies flare and lilies smile; How soon the fleeting minute dies, Leaving us but a little while To dream our dream, to sing our song To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower, The Gods—they do not give us long— One little hour.

Our little hour—how short it is When Love with dew-eyed loveliness Raises her lips for ours to kiss And dies within our first caress. Youth flickers out like windblown flame, Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour, For Time and Death, relentless, claim One little hour.

Our little hour,—how short a time To wage our wars, to fan our fates, To take our fill of armored crime, To troop our banner, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped One little hour?

Our little hour—how soon it dies; How short a time to tell our beads, To chant our feeble Litanies, To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds, The altar lights grow pale and dim, The bells hang silent in the tower, So passes with the dying hymn, Our little hour.

THE END