He is having a hard time.  I do not see that there is any reason to make light of it.  If you do, you rob him of the credit which, if ever man deserved it, he ought to be getting now—­the credit for putting a good face upon it under conditions which, to him, especially at the beginning, were sheer undiluted misery.  Some people think that to tell the truth in these matters would hinder recruiting.  Well, if it did, it would only mean that the young Australians who stay at home are guilty of greater meanness than one has ever thought.  For the Australian here has plunged straight into an existence more like that of a duck in a farmyard drain than to any other condition known or dreamed of in his own sunny land.  He is resisting it not only passably but well.  And if you want to know the reason—­as far as any general reason can be given—­the motive, which keeps him trying day after day, is the desire that no man shall say a word against Australia.  I don’t know if his country is thinking of him—­a good part of it must be—­but he is thinking of his country all the time.  Australia has made her name in the world during this war—­the world knows her now.  It is these men—­not the men who shout at stadiums and race meetings at home, but the simple, willing men who are described in this letter—­who are making Australia’s name for her—­and just at present holding on to it like grim death.

Even the life of a duck in a farmyard drain becomes in a wonderful way supportable when you tackle it as cheerfully as that.  It comes to the Australian as a shock, at the first introduction—­the Manning River country after the Manning River flood has subsided is, as a New South Welshman suggested, the nearest imitation that he has ever seen.  But then there was blue sky and dazzling sun over that; whereas here the whole grey sky seems to drip off his hatbrim and nose and chilled fingers and the shiny oil sheet tied around his neck, and to ooze into his back and his boots.  It is all fairly comfortable in the green country from which he starts.  There has been a fairly warm billet in the half dark of a big barn, where the morning light comes through in strange shafts and triangles up in the blackness amongst the gaunt roof beams.  There was a canteen—­which is really an officially managed shop for good, cheap groceries—­in an outhouse at the end of the village; there were three or four estaminets and cafes, with cheerful and passably pretty mademoiselles, and good coffee, and very vile wine, labelled temporarily as champagne.  There was also—­for some who obtained leave—­a visit to a neighbouring town.