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
Pozières 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