nd the 36th of Ulster. The New Armies were made
up of all the volunteers who had answered the call to the colors, not
waiting for the conscription by class, which followed later. They were
the ardent ones, the young men from office, factory, shop, and field,
university and public school. The best of our intelligence were there,
the noblest of our manhood, the strength of our heart, the beauty of
our soul, in those battalions which soon were to be flung into explosive
fires.

III

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads
behind the front.

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there
was a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day
and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old
ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black
frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered,
and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line of transport
wagons came through the square.

"By Jove!... Australians!"

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance, but
without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of their
own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along those
roads of war.

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little
old market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor
Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a boyhood
and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the softer
training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the
girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode
their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though born to riding,
and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that
was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman's
table of colored ribbons.

Those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered men, who had come out of
the hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands,
looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash
in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding
down the street.

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and good to them (though
so old and stale to many of us), and after their adventures in the East
they found it splendid to be in a civilized count