ill 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, alon