sent it back to his officer, and his officer sent it
back to the brigade, and the brigade sent it on to the division. The
division was a little sceptical. "That crowd is always making these wild
discoveries," grunted the divisional Intelligence Officer, but he
thought it worth while passing it on to the Army Corps, who in their
turn sent it to the Army; and so, in due course, it arrived in those
awe-inspiring circles where lives the great German military brain.

"So that is where they have turned up," said a very big man with
spectacles--a big man in more ways than one. And a note went down in
red ink in a particular page of a huge index, to appear duly printed in
the next edition of that portentous volume. Only, after the note, there
was a query.

Far away at the front, Fritz told his mates over their evening coffee
that the new regiment whose heads they had been noticing over the
parapet opposite were Australians.

"Black swine dogs, one of them nearly had me as I was bringing the
mail-bags," snorted a weedy youth scarcely out of his teens, looking
over the top of his coffee pot. "I always said that was a dangerous gap
where the communication trench crosses the ditch."

"You babies should keep your stupid heads down like your elders,"
retorted a grizzled reservist as he stuffed tobacco into the green china
bowl of a real German pipe.

The talk gradually went along the front line for about the distance of
one company's front on either side, that there had been a relief in the
British trenches, and that there were Australians over there. One man
had heard the sergeant saying so in the next bay of the trench; it meant
exactly as much to them as it would to Australian troops to hear the
corps opposite them was Bavarian or Saxon or Hanoverian. They knew the
English and the French possessed some of these colonial corps. They had
been opposite the Algerians in the Champagne before they came to this
part of the line.

"They are ugly swine to meet in the dark," they thought. "These white
and black colonial regiments."

Fritz lives very much in his dug-out--is very good at keeping his head
below the parapet--and he thought very little more about it. His head
was much fuller of the arrival of the weekly parcel of butter and cake
from his hardworking wife at home, and of the coming days when his
battalion would go out of the trenches into billets in the villages,
when he might get a pass to go to a picture theatre in Lil