And yet here the new men came—­a line of them, stumbling from crater into crater, and by one of those unaccountable chances that occur in battles, only two or three of them were hit in crossing over.  They dropped into the trench by the side of the Australians.  Their bombers went to the left to relieve the men who had been holding the open flank.  They brought in with them keen, fresh faces and bodies, and an all-important supply of bombs.  It was better than a draught of good wine.

So it was that the first of the Canadians arrived.

Long before the last Australian platoon left that battered line, these first Canadians were almost as tired as they.  For thirty-six hours they had piled up the same barricades, garrisoned the same shell-holes, were shattered by the same shells.  Twenty-four hours after the Canadians came, the vicious bombardment described in the last letter descended on the flank they both were holding.  They were buried together by the heavy shell-bursts.  They dug each other out.  When the garrison became so thin that whole lengths of trench were without a single unwounded occupant, they helped each others’ wounded down to the next length, and built another barricade, and held that.

Finally, when hour after hour passed and the incessant shelling never ceased, the garrison was withdrawn a little farther; and then five of them went back to the barricade which the enemy’s artillery had discovered.  They sat down in the trench behind it.  A German battery was trying for it—­putting its four big high-explosive shells regularly round it—­salvo after salvo as punctual as clockwork.  It was only a matter of time before the thing must go.

So the five sat there—­Tasmanians and Canadians—­and discussed the rival methods of wheat growing in their respective dominions in order to keep their thoughts away from that inevitable shell.

It came at last, through their shelter—­slashed one man across the face, killed two and left two—­smashed the barricade into a scrap-heap.  Then others were brought to stand by.  Shells were falling anything from thirty to forty in the minute.  One of the remaining Tasmanian sergeants—­a Lewis gunner—­came back from an errand, crawling, wounded dangerously through the neck.  “I don’t want to go away,” he said.  “If I can’t work a Lewis gun, I can sit by another chap and tell him how to.”  In the end, when he was sent away, he was seen crawling on two knees and one hand, guiding with the other hand a fellow gunner who had been hit.

That night a big gun, much bigger than the rest, sent its shells roaring down through the sky somewhere near.  The men would be waked by the shriek of each shell and then fall asleep and be waked again by the crash of the explosion.  And still they held the trench.  And still every other message ended—­“But we will hold on.”

They had withdrawn a little to where they could hold during the night; but before the grey morning, the moment the bombardment had eased, they crept back again lest the Germans should get there first.