Letters from France

The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist of the ship a densely packed crowd o...

So the Australians are in France. A great reception at the port of landing, so we hear. A long, weary train journey in a troop train which never alters its pace, but moves stead...

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 again...

There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township for a hundred miles has that same sign...

The cottage door is open to the night. The soft air of a beautiful evening following on a glorious day brushes past one into the room. As I stand here the nightingale from a nei...

The night air on every side of us was full of strange sound. It was not loud nor near, but it was there all the time. We could hear it even while we talked and above the sound o...

Gallipoli had its own special difficulties for aeroplanes. There was no open space on which they could dream of alighting at Anzac; and one machine which had to come down at Suv...

I sat down to write an article about a log-chopping competition. But the irony of writing such things with other things on one's mind is too much even for a war correspondent. O...

It was in "A forest of France," as the programme had it. The road ran down a great aisle with the tall elm trees reaching to the sky, and stretching their long green fingers far...

It was about three months ago, more or less. The German observer, crouched up in the platform behind the trunk of a tree, or in a chimney with a loose brick in it--in a part of...

Below me, in the dimple beyond the hill on which I sit, is a small French town. Straight behind the town is the morning sun, only an hour risen. Between the sun and the town, an...

Yesterday three of us walked out from near the town of Albert to a hill-side within a few hundred yards of Fricourt. And there all day, lying amongst the poppies and cornflowers...

Yesterday from the opposite slope of a gentle valley we watched Fricourt village taken. This morning we walked down through the long grass across what two days ago was No Man's...

During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to the north, near Armentières, raided the German trenches about a dozen times. Here is a sample of these r...

I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of British regular troops on their...

When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under which men had burrowed like rats, but...

There have been four distinct battles fought by the Australian troops on the Somme since they made their first charge from the British trenches near Pozières. The first was the...

For a mile the country had been flayed. The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open--it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callo...

The Germans call it _Trommelfeuer_--drum fire. I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield....

It is a month this morning since Australians plunged into the heart of the most modern of battles. They had been in many sorts of battle before; but they had never been in the b...

It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent in the stubborn fight...

Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian Mountain Batteries and Infantry were...

On the same day on which the British took Guillemont and reached Ginchy and Leuze Wood; on the same day on which the French pushed their line almost to Combles; at the same time...

I shall not forget the first I saw of them. We were at a certain headquarters not a thousand miles from the enemy's barrage. Messages had dribbled through from each part of the...

It was after seven weeks of very heavy fighting. Even those whose duty took them rarely up amongst the shells were almost worn out with the prolonged strain. Those who had been...

We were in a new corner. The New Zealanders had pushed right through to the comparatively green country just here--and so had the British to north and south of it. We were well...

He is having a hard time. I do not see that there is any reason to make light of it. If you do, you rob him of the credit which, if ever man deserved it, he ought to be getting...

A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a man--an educated man--if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund. "Certainly not," wa...

Yesterday morning we were looking across a bare, shallow valley at the opposite knuckle of hill-side, around the foot of which the valley doubled back out of sight. A solitary g...

The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Grass Bank out of the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not be clear at first sight. Tam's bee...

By the muddy, shell-pitted roadside of the sunken road in Le Barque, behind the German lines, were found three shapeless forms. The mud dripped from them as they lay, but they w...

A fair-sized shell recently arrived in a certain front trench held by Australians in France. It exploded, and an Australian found himself struggling amongst some debris in No Ma...

"Oh, that is all right--Anzac troops--there's no objection to that--we are that," went on the grammarian with the elbow sling, "but there's no such thing as an Anzac--the Anzacs...