That afternoon the Germans attacked that open flank with heavy artillery.  For hours shell after shell crashed into the earth around.  A heavy battery found the barricade and put its four big shells systematically round it.  They reduced the garrison as far as possible, and four or five only were kept by the barricade.  They were not all Australians now.

For the end of the Australian work was coming very near.  But that occasion deserves a letter to itself.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW THE AUSTRALIANS WERE RELIEVED

France, September 19th.

It was before the moment at which my last letter ended that the time had come for the first relieving troops to be drafted into the fight.

I shall not forget the first I saw of them.  We were at a certain headquarters not a thousand miles from the enemy’s barrage.  Messages had dribbled through from each part of the attacking line telling exactly where every portion of it had got to; or rather telling where each portion believed it had got to—­as far as it could judge by sticking up its collective head from shell craters and broken-down trench walls and staring out over the limitless sea of craters and crabholes which surrounded it.  As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant—­and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun, all very close—­the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic.  Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be.  The next business was to fill up certain gaps.  An order was dispatched to the supports.  They were to send an officer to receive instructions.

He came.  He was a man nearing middle age, erect, tough as wire, with lines in his face such as hard fighting and responsibility leave on the face of every soldier.

The representative of authority upon the spot—­an Australian who also had faced ugly scenes—­explained to him quietly where he wished him to take his men, into such and such a corner, by such and such a route.  It meant plunging straight into the thick of the Somme battle, with all its unknown horrors—­everyone there knew that.  But the new-comer said quietly, “Yes, sir”—­and climbed up and out into the light.

It was not an Australian who spoke.  That “Yes, sir” came unmistakably from the other side of the Pacific.  It was the first of the Canadians upon the Somme battlefield.

An hour or so later an Australian officer, moving along with his men to improve an exposed and isolated trench (a trench which was outflanked already, and enfiladed, and in half a dozen ways unhealthy) into a condition to be held against any attacks at all costs—­found, coming across the open towards his exposed flank, a line of stalwart men in kilts.  His men were dead tired, the enemy’s shell-fire was constant and heavy, grey heads and helmets constantly seen behind a red mud parapet, across a hundred yards of red mud craters, proved that the Prussian Guard Reserve was getting ready to counter-attack him.  Every message he sent back to Headquarters finished, “But we will hold this trench.”