[Illustration:  THE WINDMILL OF POZIERES AND THE SHELL-SHATTERED GROUND AROUND IT]

[Illustration:  THE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCH]

One picked the likeliest line, and was ploughing along it, when a bullet hissed not far away.  It did not seem probable that there were Germans in the landscape.  One looked for another cause.  Away to one side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position.  It must be some stray bullet meant for them.  Then another bullet hissed.

So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole trench, the enemy must still have been holding on.  It was a case for keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.

Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard.  In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world, to tell a trench when you come to it.  One of the problems of the modern battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it.  The stretch in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice, here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position with its wickerwork shell-covers around it—­the whole looking like a broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary.  An officer crawled out to some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.

Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this sort of wilderness.  I spoke the other day to a little tailor or bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes.  “Yes, we were put out there to dig an outpost trench,” he said.  “The sergeant gave us a wrong direction, I think.  We took two days’ rations and went out hundreds of yards.  No one came near us.  There was firing on all sides, and we did not know where we were.  Our food was finished—­we saw men working—­we did not know who they were—­but they were English, and we were captured.”

CHAPTER XXI

ANGELS’ WORK

France, August 28th.

It had been a wild night.  Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozieres Ridge towards Mouquet Farm.  Along a good part of the line the troops were back in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only slightly in advance of it.  At other points they were in the trenches they had gone out for.