oking unreal in their steel helmets which they wore in
place of the broad-brimmed hats. There was a sort of warlike intensity
about them which may come from the sunlight of an island continent
reflecting the histrionic adaptability of appearances to the task in
hand.

Their first objective was to be the main street. They had a "stiff job"
ahead, as everybody agreed, and so had the British troops operating on
their right.

"This objective business has a highly educated sound, which might limit
martial enthusiasm," said one Australian. "As I understand it, that's
the line where we stop no matter how good the going and which we must
reach no matter how hard the going."

Precisely. An Australian battalion needed a warning in the first
instance lest it might keep on advancing, which meant that commanders
would not know where it was in the shell-smoke and it might get
"squeezed" for want of support on the right and left, as I have
explained elsewhere. Certainly, warning was unnecessary in the second
instance about the hard going.

Bean has all the details of the taking of Pozieres; he knows what every
battalion did, and I was going to say what every soldier did. When the
Australians were in he was in making notes and when they were out he was
out writing up his notes. His was intimate war correspondence about the
fellows who came from all the districts of his continent, his home
folks. I am only expressing the impressions of one who had glimpses of
the Australians while the battle was raging elsewhere.

Of course, skeptics had said that Gallipoli was one thing and the Somme
another and the Australian man-to-man method might receive a shock from
Prussian system; but, then, skeptics had said that the British could not
make an army in two years. The Australians knew what was in the
skeptics' minds, which was further incentive. They had a general whom
they believed in and they did not admit that any man on earth was a
better man than an Australian. And their staff? Of course, when it takes
forty years to make a staff how could the Australians have one that
could hold its own with the Germans? And this was what the Australians
had to do, staff and man: beat the Germans.

When with clockwork promptness came the report that they had taken all
of their objectives it showed that they were up to the standard of their
looks and their staff signals were working well. They had a lot of
prisoners, too, who complained that the Austra