Those Kangaroos took to that song as a duck takes to water!  They raised the chorus with me in a swelling roar as soon as they had heard it once, to learn it, and their voices roared through the ruins like vocal shrapnel.  You could hear them whoop “Australia Is the Land for Me!” a mile away.  And if anything could have brought down that tottering statue above us it would have been the way they sang.  They put body and soul, as well as voice, into that final patriotic declaration of the song.

We had thought—­I speak for Hogge and Adam and myself, and not for Godfrey, who did not have to think and guess, but know—­we had thought, when we rolled into Albert, that it was a city of the dead, utterly deserted and forlorn.  But now, as I went on singing, we found that that idea had been all wrong.  For as the Australians whooped up their choruses other soldiers popped into sight.  They came pouring from all directions.

I have seen few sights more amazing.  They came from cracks and crevices, as it seemed; from under tumbled heaps of ruins, and dropping down from shells of houses where there were certainly no stairs.  As I live, before I had finished my audience had been swollen to a great one of two thousand men!  When they were all roaring out in a chorus you could scarce hear Johnson’s wee piano at all—­it sounded only like a feeble tinkle when there was a part for it alone.

I began shaking hands, when I had finished singing.  That was a verrainjudeecious thing for me to attempt there!  I had not reckoned with the strength of the grip of those laddies from the underside of the world.  But I had been there, and I should have known.

Soon came the order to the Kangaroos:  “Fall in!”

At once the habit of stern discipline prevailed.  They swung off again, and the last we saw of them they were just brown men, disappearing along a brown road, bound for the trenches.

Swiftly the mole-like dwellers in Albert melted away, until only a few officers were left beside the members of the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour.  And I grew grave and distraught myself.

CHAPTER XXV

One of the officers at Albert was looking at me in a curiously intent fashion.  I noticed that.  And soon he came over to me.  “Where do you go next, Harry?” he asked me.  His voice was keenly sympathetic, and his eyes and his manner were very grave.

“To a place called Ovilliers,” I said.

“So I thought,” he said.  He put out his hand, and I gripped it, hard.  “I know, Harry.  I know exactly where you are going, and I will send a man with you to act as your guide, who knows the spot you want to reach.”

I couldn’t answer him.  I was too deeply moved.  For Ovilliers is the spot where my son, Captain John Lauder, lies in his soldier’s grave.  That grave had been, of course, from the very first, the final, the ultimate objective of my journey.  And that morning, as we set out from Tramecourt, Captain Godfrey had told me, with grave sympathy, that at last we were coming to the spot that had been so constantly in my thoughts ever since we had sailed from Folkestone.