An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles and the Somme and Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Australian, with a delicate, clean-cut face, thoughtful and grave, with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a wounded lad on to a stretcher when a shell came over his head, killed the boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, sixty men and a German battalion staff in their headquarter dug-outs below Polygon Wood. "Where is your revolver?" he said to the captain. The German hesitated, and said: "You will shoot me if I fetch it." "I will shoot you if you don't," said the little Australian. And he meant what he said, as I could see by the set of his lips when he told me the tale. But the German captain handed over his revolver quietly, and his maps, which were very useful. It was a wonderful scene to-day among all these Australian lads, who had just been relieved and were talking over the scenes of yesterday's history in small groups while they scraped off the mud and shaved before bits of broken mirror, and polished up German rifles and machine-guns and handled their souvenirs, found in the dug-outs and blockhouses. Many of them were stripped to the waist, some of them wore German caps, some of them slept like drugged men in spite of all the noise about them. After taking the first objective they had to wait for two hours before they went on, and there were queer scenes about the blockhouses and in the felled woods. They had found the German rations, and besides the sausages and bread and gallons of cold coffee in petrol-tins, which the boys shared among themselves, quantities of long, fat, and excellent cigars. Hundreds of Australians smoked these cigars while they waited for the barrage to lift, and when they went on again hundreds of them were still puffing them as they trudged on to Polygon Wood. They had a good day. I have met some of them, who said they enjoyed it, and would not have missed it for worlds. The excitement of it all kept them going. The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. An Australian doctor had his arm smashed, but stayed among the boys, regardless of his own hurt. A V.C. officer of the Dardanelles was killed as he went back wounded on a stretcher. German wounded lay crying for help, and our men rescued them. So about Glencorse Wood and Polygon Wood human agony and the wild spirits of Australian youth, death, and the vitality of boyhood in the passion of a great adventure were queerly mixed, and one side of this