[Illustration: "TALKING WITH THE KIDDIES IN THE STREET"]

It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant
sound--ever so familiar--the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at
Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.

And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room,
across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever
and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field
guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.

Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in
France.




CHAPTER III

THE FIRST IMPRESSION--A COUNTRY WITH EYES

_France, April, 1916._


Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their
thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row
of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under
the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets--great bunches of