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 country, 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.”
They went far, from that time to the end, and fought with a simple,
terrible courage.
They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men by Regular
traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in
their hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or
caste unless it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the
lines, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable, human,
generous souls when their bayonets were not red with blood. Their
discipline in battle was the best. They wanted to get to a place ahead.
They would fight the devils of hell to get there.
The New-Zealanders followed them, with rosy cheeks like English boys
of Kent, and more gentle manners than the other “Anzacs,” and the same
courage. They went far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap.
But that, in the summer of '16, was far away.
In those last days of June, before the big battles began, the
countryside of the Somme valley was filled with splendor. The mustard
seed had spread a yellow carpet in many meadows so that they were Fields
of the Cloth of Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like flowers
of blood. The hedges about the villages of Picardy were white with
elderflower and drenched with scent. It was haymaking time and French
women and children were tossing the hay on wooden pitchforks during hot
days which came between heavy rains. Our men were marching through that
beauty, and were conscious of it, I think, and glad of life.