appeared a white flag, which was waved vigorously.  Sixteen prisoners came out, including a regimental doctor.  There were several other dug-outs in this part and various scraps of old trenches, probably the site of an old battery.  The Germans, now that they had been driven from their main lines, were naturally fighting from the various scraps of isolated fortification which exist behind all positions.  During the afternoon two patrols were sent to clear out other snipers from these half-hidden lurking places.  But the garrison was sufficiently organised to summon up some sort of reserve, and the patrols had to come back after a short, sharp fight more or less in the open.

After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village.  By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole village was secure against sudden attack.

An official report would read:  “The same progress continued on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozieres was consolidated.”  That is to say—­in the heart of the village itself there was little more actual hand-to-hand fighting.  All that happened there was that, from the time when the first day broke and found the Pozieres position practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it.  Hour after hour—­day and night—­with increasing intensity as the days went on, he rained heavy shell into the area.  It was the sight of the battlefield for miles around—­that reeking village.  Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road—­eight heavy shells at a time, minute after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel.  Now he would place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through a lift of fog.  Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9’s.  Day and night the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand—­building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and again.

What is a barrage against such troops!  They went through it as you would go through a summer shower—­too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking.  I am telling you of things I have seen.  As one of the best of their officers said to me, “I have to walk about as if I liked it—­what else can you do when your own men teach you to?” The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.