urricane, night
and day, until its duration almost passed memory--amidst sights and
sounds indescribable, desperately tried? I was out there once after such
a time as that. There they were in their dusty ditch in that blasted,
brown Sahara of a country--Sydney boys, country fellows from New South
Wales, our old friends just as we knew them, heavy eyed, tired to death
as after a long fight with a bush fire or heavy work in drought
time--but simply doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary
Australian way. And that is all they had been doing and all they wished
anyone to believe they had been doing.

But what are we going to do for them? The mere noise is enough to break
any man's nerves. Every one of those shrieking shells which fell night
and day might mean any man's instant death. As he hears each shell
coming he knows it. He saw the sights around him--he was buried by earth
and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn. What can we do
for him? I know only one thing--it is the only alleviation that science
knows of. (I am talking now of the most modern and heaviest of battles,
and of the thick and centre of it; for no men have ever been through a
heavier fight than Pozieres.) We can force some mitigation of all this
by one means and one alone--if we can give the Germans worse. The chief
anxiety in the mind of the soldier is--have we got the guns and the
shells--can we keep ahead of them with guns and our ammunition? That
means everything. These men have the nerve to go through these infernos,
provided their friends at home do not desert them. If the munition
worker could see what I have seen, he would toil as though he were
racing against time to save the life of a man.

I saw yesterday a letter picked up on the battlefield--it was from an
Australian private. "Dear Mother, sisters, brothers and Auntie Lill," it
said. "As we are about to go into work that must be done, I want to ask
you, if anything should happen to me, not to worry. You must think of
all the mothers that have lost ones as dear to them. One thing you can
say--that you lost one doing his little bit for a good cause.

"I know you shall feel it if anything does happen to me, but I am
willing and prepared to give my life for the cause."

Such lives hang from hour to hour on the work that is done in the
British factories.

CHAPTER XX

THE NEW FIGHTING

_France, August 20th._

It is a month this morning since Australians