ns thought it was a war for
Kultur--our civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur,
against religion, against all civilization."

"How will it end?" I asked him.

"I see no end to it," he answered. "It is the suicide of nations.
Germany is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is
impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?"

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no
end of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living
humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the
autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat,
unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the
British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how
the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it
worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleeding to death?

XVIII

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the
beginning of August until the middle of September--six weeks of fighting
as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time. The
Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm,
where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the
Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was unceasing
slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and
again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound of forsaken
brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and smoke.

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their
quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their
ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the last word
in frightfulness. The intensity of the shell-fire under which they lay
shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their wounded told me that
it had broken their nerve. They would never fight again without a sense
of horror.

"Our men are more highly strung than the English," said one Australian
officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those
Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in
their fiber.

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the
earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by yard,
and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenche