the air seems full of it. Far away
over the horizon is an incessant flicker like summer lightning, very
faint but quite continuous. Under the nightingale's note comes always a
dull grumble, throbbing and bumping occasionally, but seldom quite
ceasing. Someone is getting it heavily down there--it is not our
Australians; I think I know their direction.

It was just such a glorious day as this one has been, a year ago, when
this corps of untried soldiers suddenly rushed into the nightmare of a
desperate fight. At this moment of the night the rattle of rifle fire
was incessant all round the hills. Men were digging and firing and
digging in a dream which had continued since early dawn and had to
continue for two more days and nights before there was the first chance
of rest. They were old soldiers within twenty-four hours, as their
leader told them in an order which was circulated at the time. Only a
sprinkling of the men who were there are in the Anzac units to-day. But
they are the officers and the N.C.O.'s, and that means a great deal.

We have been here long enough now to discover the differences between
this front and the old fighting-line in Gallipoli. The rain has been
heavier in March than for thirty-five years, and April until yesterday
seemed almost as bad. The trenches are made passable by being floored
with a wooden pathway which runs on piles--underneath which is the
gutter of water and mud which is the real floor of the trench. Sometimes
the water rises in the communication trenches so that the boards float
or disappear, and if you happen to step into an interval between them
you may quite well sink to your waist in thin clay mud. The actual
firing trenches and the dug-outs there are mostly dry by comparison,
except where the accumulated task of draining them has been gaining on
some regiment which garrisons them, and the rear of the line is a morass
of foul-smelling clay.

This difficulty never really reached us in Gallipoli, though we might
possibly have found the trenches falling in upon us in the rains of
winter if we had stayed. The trenches in France are full of traces of
old dug-outs and mouldering sandbags, collapsed through rain in the dim
past before the timbering of all works was looked on as a necessity. In
Anzac we never had the timber for this, and one doubts if we ever could
have had it had we stayed. The soil there was dry and held well, and the
trenches were deep and very elaborate to a degr