For they had been up into the line, and the places behind the line, and out again.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE WINTER OF 1916

France, December 20th.

A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne.  Its writer had asked a man—­an educated man—­if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund.  “Certainly not,” was the reply.  “The men have every comfort in the trenches.”

That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably angry—­the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hardships for his mother’s sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army calls “eyewash”—­a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not there.

As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as long as history lasts.  It is to some extent past history now—­to what extent I do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.

I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time.  Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm—­gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets.  But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner—­yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher—­take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit.  Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with—­on his back—­all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees—­sometimes up to his waist—­along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—­holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all.  After many hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no grass about it—­nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see.  At the end of it all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm—­whatever weather comes—­and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover.  And this is what our men have had to go through.