Meanwhile the exhibition chop went on.  The French woodsmen were digging at the roots of their trees with long, ancient axes, more like a cold chisel than a modern axe.  “I think I could do as well with a knife and fork,” said one great kindly Australian as he watched with a smile.

But, to my mind, that exhibition was the most impressive of all.  For every one of those who took part in it was either an old man or a slip of a slender boy.

CHAPTER X

IDENTIFIED

France, June 28th.

It was about three months ago, more or less.  The German observer, crouched up in the platform behind the trunk of a tree, or in a chimney with a loose brick in it—­in a part of the world where the country cottages, peeping over the dog-rose hedges, have more broken bricks in them than whole ones—­saw down a distant lane several men in strange hats.  The telescope wobbled a bit, and in the early light all objects in the landscape took on much the same grey colour.

The observer rubbed his red eyes and peered again.  Down the white streak winding across a distant green field were coming a couple more of these same hats.  I expect Fritz saw a good number of them in those days.  Many of the wearers of those hats had never seen an aeroplane before; much less two aeroplanes, fighting a duel with machine-guns at close range, 10,000 feet over their heads, or being sniped at by a battery of hidden 15-pounder guns, every shot marking itself for the open-mouthed spectators by its little white cotton-wool shell burst.

The German observer spent several hours jotting painful notes into a well-thumbed pocket-book, staring in the intervals through his telescope.  Then the tree shook.  Something ponderous from below felt its way up the creaking ladder.  A red face, like the face of the sun, peered over the platform.

“Anything new, Fritz?” it puffed.

“Ja; those new troops we have noticed yesterday—­I think they were Australians.”

So the observer 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.