the house, and another talking to the kiddies in the
street. There was a platoon of them drilling behind a long barn.

A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we
stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there
was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where
we were billeted. On the green door of the house next to it, behind the
pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, "Mess--five officers." That was
where we were to feed.

[Illustration: "TALKING WITH THE KIDDIES IN THE STREET"]

It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant
sound--ever so familiar--the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at
Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.

And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room,
across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever
and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field
guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.

Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in
France.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST IMPRESSION--A COUNTRY WITH EYES

_France, April, 1916._

Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their
thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row
of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under
the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets--great bunches of
them--in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow
cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the
flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering
them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the
cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet,
totters across the road to her, laughing.

Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low
whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented
kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another and
another and another. We could see the white smoke of the shells floating
past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. It
drifted slowly through the trees and then came another salvo. There were
some red roofs near--those of a neighbouring farm--but we could not see
whether the