d with every sort of gun
and trench mortar, although fresh companies of the Prussian Guard
Reserve constantly filed in to the gap which existed between this point
and Mouquet Farm. Their old leader, who had promised to reach that
trench with them, was not there. They found him lying dead within a few
yards of it, straight in front of the machine-gun which they had
silenced. So Littler had kept his promise--and lost his life. They had a
young officer and a few sergeants. All through that day their numbers
slowly dwindled. They held the trench all the next night, and in the
grey dawn of the second day a sentry, looking over the trench, saw the
Germans a little way outside of it. As he pointed them out he fell back
shot through the head. They told the Queenslanders, and the
Queenslanders came out instantly and bombed from their side, in rear of
the Germans. The Queensland officer was shot dead, but the Germans were
cleared out or killed.

That afternoon the Germans attacked that open flank with heavy
artillery. For hours shell after shell crashed into the earth around. A
heavy battery found the barricade and put its four big shells
systematically round it. They reduced the garrison as far as possible,
and four or five only were kept by the barricade. They were not all
Australians now.

For the end of the Australian work was coming very near. But that
occasion deserves a letter to itself.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW THE AUSTRALIANS WERE RELIEVED

_France, September 19th._

It was before the moment at which my last letter ended that the time had
come for the first relieving troops to be drafted into the fight.

I shall not forget the first I saw of them. We were at a certain
headquarters not a thousand miles from the enemy's barrage. Messages had
dribbled through from each part of the attacking line telling exactly
where every portion of it had got to; or rather telling where each
portion believed it had got to--as far as it could judge by sticking up
its collective head from shell craters and broken-down trench walls and
staring out over the limitless sea of craters and crabholes which
surrounded it. As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree
stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the
horizon, all very distant--and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an
unseen machine-gun, all very close--the determination was apt to be a
trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down