recruiting lists were opened “the six bob a day tourists.”  Well—­the “Tourists” made a name for Australia such as no other Australians can ever have the privilege to make.  The next shipment were the “Dinkums”—­the men who came over on principle to fight for Australia—­the real, fair dinkum[3] Australians.  After them came the “Super-dinkums”—­and the next the “War Babies,” and after them the “Chocolate Soldiers,” then the “Hard Thinkers,” who were pictured as thinking very hard before they came.  And then the “Neutrals.”  “We know they are not against the Allies,” the others said, when came news of the latest drafts still training steadily under peace conditions, “we know they are not against us—­we suppose they are just neutral.”

[3] “Dinkum”—­Australian for “true.”

There has always been some chaff thrown at the latest arrival—­and it is a mistake to think that there was never any feeling behind the chaff.  I remember long ago at Anzac when a new draft was moving up past some of the older troops—­past men who were thin with disease and overworn with heavy work—­there was a cry of “You have come at last, have you?” flung in a tone of which the bitterness was unmistakable.  There has always been a feeling, amongst the older troops here, that they have been holding the fort—­hanging on for Australia’s name until the others have time to come along and give them a hand.  There is a tendency to feel that soldiers who are still at home are getting all the limelight—­the parading of streets and praises of the newspapers—­and will probably live to reap most of the glory at the end of it all.

If so, there was never a feeling that melted more quickly the moment each new draft arrives and is really tested.  The moment it goes into the whirl of a modern battle, and acquits itself through some wild night as every Australian draft always has done in its first fight and always will do, every sign of that old feeling melts as if it had never existed; and the new draft finds itself taken into the heart of the old force on the same terms as the oldest and proudest regiment there.  I make no apology for talking of them as “old” regiments.  There are regiments in this war, not three years old, which have seen as much terrible fighting as others whose record goes back over hundreds of years.  Ages ago, prehistoric ages, the “Dinkums” became a title for men to be intensely proud of.  Men who were through the first fortnight at Pozieres need never be ashamed to compare their experiences with those of any soldiers in the world, for it is the literal truth that there has never in history been a harder battle fought.  The “Chocolate Soldiers” became veterans in one terrible struggle.  The “War Babies” were old soldiers almost before they had cut their teeth.  It is one of the pities of the censorship, but a necessary one, that the Australian public cannot know, until the story of this war is fully told at the end of it, the famous Australian battalions which will most assuredly go down to history as household names.