was a query.

Far away at the front, Fritz told his mates over their evening coffee
that the new regiment whose heads they had been noticing over the
parapet opposite were Australians.

"Black swine dogs, one of them nearly had me as I was bringing the
mail-bags," snorted a weedy youth scarcely out of his teens, looking
over the top of his coffee pot. "I always said that was a dangerous gap
where the communication trench crosses the ditch."

"You babies should keep your stupid heads down like your elders,"
retorted a grizzled reservist as he stuffed tobacco into the green china
bowl of a real German pipe.

The talk gradually went along the front line for about the distance of
one company's front on either side, that there had been a relief in the
British trenches, and that there were Australians over there. One man
had heard the sergeant saying so in the next bay of the trench; it meant
exactly as much to them as it would to Australian troops to hear the
corps opposite them was Bavarian or Saxon or Hanoverian. They knew the
English and the French possessed some of these colonial corps. They had
been opposite the Algerians in the Champagne before they came to this
part of the line.

"They are ugly swine to meet in the dark," they thought. "These white
and black colonial regiments."

Fritz lives very much in his dug-out--is very good at keeping his head
below the parapet--and he thought very little more about it. His head