fighting--Sir Charles Birdwood--How he taught his troops
discipline--Bean and Ross--Difference between Australians and New
Zealanders--The Australian uniform and physique--A dollar and a half
a day--General Birdwood and his men--Australian humor.

It was British troops exclusively which started the Grand Offensive if
we except the Newfoundland battalion which alone had the honor of
representing the heroism of North America on July 1st; for people in
passing the Grand Banks which makes them think of Newfoundland are wont
to regard it as a part of Canada, when it is a separate colony whose
fishermen and frontiersmen were attached to a British division that went
to Gallipoli with a British brigade and later shared the fate of British
battalions in the attack on the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector.

On that famous day in Picardy the Newfoundlanders advanced into the
smoke of the curtains of fire unflinchingly and kept on charging the
machine guns. Survivors and the wounded who crept back at night across
No Man's Land had no need to trumpet their heroism. All the army knew
it. Newfoundland had set the pace for the other clans from oversea.

It was British troops, too, which took Contalmaison and Mametz, Bernafay
and Trones Woods and who carried out all the attack of July 15th, with
the exception of the South African brigade which stormed Delville Wood
with the tearing enthusiasm of a rush for a new diamond mine.

Whenever the troops from oversea are not mentioned you may be sure that
it is the British, the home troops, who are doing the fighting, their
number being about ten to one of the others with the one out of ten
representing double the number of those who fought on either side in any
great pitched battle in our Civil War. After the Newfoundlanders and
South Africans, who were few but precious, the Australians, an army of
themselves, came to take their part in the Somme battle.

I have never been in Australia or New Zealand, but this I know that when
the war is over I am going. I want to see the land that breeds such men.
They are free men if ever there were such; free whether they come from
town or from bush. I had heard of their commonwealth ideas, their
State-owned utilities, their socialistic inclinations, which might
incline you to think that they were all of the same State-cut pattern of
manhood; but I had heard, too, how they had restricted immigration of
Orientals and limited other immigration by meth