It is just then that the lighter guns join in with the roll as of a kettledrum—­Trommelfeuer.  The enemy is throwing out his infantry, and his shrapnel is showering on to our lines in order to keep down the heads of our men to the last moment.  Suddenly the whole noise eases.  The enemy is casting his shrapnel and big shell farther back.

The chances are that most men in those racked lines do not know whether the enemy ever delivers the attack or not.  Our artillery breaks the head of it before it crosses No Man’s Land.  A few figures on the skyline, hopping from crater to crater, indicate what is left of it.  As soon as they find rifle fire and machine-guns on them the remnant give it up as hopeless.  They thought our men would have run—­and they found them still at their post; that is all.

And what of the men who have been out there under that hurricane, night and day, until its duration almost passed memory—­amidst sights and sounds indescribable, desperately tried?  I was out there once after such a time as that.  There they were in their dusty ditch in that blasted, brown Sahara of a country—­Sydney boys, country fellows from New South Wales, our old friends just as we knew them, heavy eyed, tired to death as after a long fight with a bush fire or heavy work in drought time—­but simply doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary Australian way.  And that is all they had been doing and all they wished anyone to believe they had been doing.

But what are we going to do for them?  The mere noise is enough to break any man’s nerves.  Every one of those shrieking shells which fell night and day might mean any man’s instant death.  As he hears each shell coming he knows it.  He saw the sights around him—­he was buried by earth and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn.  What can we do for him?  I know only one thing—­it is the only alleviation that science knows of. (I am talking now of the most modern and heaviest of battles, and of the thick and centre of it; for no men have ever been through a heavier fight than Pozieres.) We can force some mitigation of all this by one means and one alone—­if we can give the Germans worse.  The chief anxiety in the mind of the soldier is—­have we got the guns and the shells—­can we keep ahead of them with guns and our ammunition?  That means everything.  These men have the nerve to go through these infernos, provided their friends at home do not desert them.  If the munition worker could see what I have seen, he would toil as though he were racing against time to save the life of a man.

I saw yesterday a letter picked up on the battlefield—­it was from an Australian private.  “Dear Mother, sisters, brothers and Auntie Lill,” it said.  “As we are about to go into work that must be done, I want to ask you, if anything should happen to me, not to worry.  You must think of all the mothers that have lost ones as dear to them.  One thing you can say—­that you lost one doing his little bit for a good cause.