ey refuse war the credit of being the only exercise in devotion on the
large scale existing in this world. The superb moral victory over death
leaves them cold. Each one to his taste. To me this is no valley of
death--it is a valley brim full of life at its highest power. Men live
through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years of
Bendigo or Ballarat. Ask the brothers of these very fighters--Calgoorlie
or Coolgardie miners--to do one quarter the work and to run one
hundredth the risk on a wages basis--instanter there would be a riot.
But here,--not a murmur, not a question; only a radiant force of
camaraderie in action.

The Turks have heaps of cartridges and more shells, anyway, than we
have. They have as many grenades as they can throw; we have--a dozen per
Company. There is a very bitter feeling amongst all the troops, but
especially the Australians, at this lack of elementary weapons like
grenades. Our overseas men are very intelligent. They are prepared to
make allowances for lack of shell; lack of guns; lack of high
explosives. But they know there must be something wrong when the Turks
carry ten good bombs to our one bad one; and they think, some of them,
that this must be my fault. Far from it. _Directly_ after the naval
battle of the 18th March--i.e., over two months ago, I wrote out a cable
asking for bombs. I sent this on my own happy thought, and I had hoped
for a million by the date of landing five weeks later. But I got,
practically, none; nor any promise for the future. In default of help
from home, we have tried to manufacture these primitive but very
effective projectiles for ourselves with jam pots, meat tins and any old
rubbish we can scrape together. De Lothbiniere has shown ingenuity in
thus making bricks without straw. The Fleet, too, has played up and de
Robeck has guaranteed me two thousand to be made by the artificers on
the battleships. Maxwell in Egypt has been improvising a few; Methuen at
Malta says they can't make them there. But what a shame that the sons of
a manufacturing country like Great Britain should be in straits for
engines so simple.

Yesterday and to-day we have fired, for us, a terrible lot of shells
(1,800 shrapnel) but never was shot better spent. We reckon the enemy's
casualties between 1,000 and 2,000 mainly caused by our guns playing on
the columns which came up trying to improve upon their lodgment in
Quinn's Post. Add this to the 3,000 killed, and,