ry, with water in the
sky and in the fields, with green trees about them, and flowers in the
grass, and white people who were friendly.

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they were all at the
windows, drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of their
officers told me that again and again he heard the same words spoken by
those lads of his.

"It's a good country to fight for... It's like being home again."

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had been bad for
them during the first weeks in April, when the wind had blown cold and
rain-clouds had broken into sharp squalls.

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth
chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the
wind, after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun.

One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying
sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers,
and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities
had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an
amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they
were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a
wonderful simplicity of youth and the gift of laughter.

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the
gas-masks which none of us ever left behind when we went near the
fighting-line. That horror of war on the western front was new to them.

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the
gas-masks seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the
headgear in the fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters
... But one man watching them gave a shudder and said, "It's a pity such
splendid boys should have to risk this foul way of death." They did not
hear his words, and we heard their laughter again.

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard with a young
officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear light, which showed the spirit
of the man, and as we talked he pointed out some of the boys who
passed in and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work on the
Peninsula, contemptuous of all risks. Another had gone out under heavy
fire to bring in a wounded friend... "Oh, they are great lads!" said
the captain of the company. "But now they want to get at the Germans and
finish the job quickly. Give them a fair chance and they'll go far."