There they were, the men whom we had last seen on the Suez Canal—­here they were, already, in the orchard alongside of the old lichened, steep-roofed barn—­four or five of them squatting round a fire of sticks, one stuffing his pipe and talking, talking, talking all the while.  I knew that they were happy there before ever they said it.  A track led across a big field—­there were two Australians walking along it.  A road crossed the railway—­two Australians were standing at the open door of the house, and another talking to the kiddies in the street.  There was a platoon of them drilling behind a long barn.

A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where we were billeted.  On the green door of the house next to it, behind the pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, “Mess—­five officers.”  That was where we were to feed.

[Illustration:  “Talking with the kiddies in the street”]

It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant sound—­ever so familiar—­the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at Cape Helles.  It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.

And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room, across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light.  It was the field guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.

Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in France.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST IMPRESSION—­A COUNTRY WITH EYES

France, April, 1916.

Rich green meadows.  Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.  Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row of soldiers.  Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under the tall trees just bursting into green.  Violets—­great bunches of them—­in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses.  You see the flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering them.  A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet, totters across the road to her, laughing.