all in, that difference more than makes up for all of them.

"You see, a fellow must look after himself a bit," one of them said to
me the other day. "A man didn't take any care how he looked in
Gallipoli; but here with these young ladies about, you can't go around
like what we used to there."

Through one's mind there flashed well-remembered figures, mostly old
slouch hat and sunburnt muscle--the lightest uniform I can recollect was
an arrangement of a shirt secured by safety pins. Here they go more
carefully dressed than if they were on leave in Melbourne or Sydney.

Yesterday the country was _en fête_, the roads swarming with young and
old, and the fields with children picking flowers. The guns were bumping
a few miles away--mostly at aeroplanes. I went to the trenches with a
friend. Our last sight, as we came away from the region of them, was of
a group of French boys and girls and a few elders around a haystack; and
half a dozen big Australians, with rolled shirtsleeves, up on the
farming machinery helping them to do the work of the year.

That is _the_ difference.




CHAPTER VI

THE GERMANS

_France, May._