Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their quality.  They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their ordeal in the Dardanelles.  Now they knew that Pozières was the last word in frightfulness.  The intensity of the shell-fire under which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them.  Many of their wounded told me that it had broken their nerve.  They would never fight again without a sense of horror.

“Our men are more highly strung than the English,” said one Australian officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as though as gristle in their fibre.

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the earth was finely powdered.  They stormed the Pozières ridge yard by yard, and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh.  In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozières now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the slopes below.