“Did you get over their line then? If so, you’re just back in time. Mist has clean gone in the last few minutes.” A sudden thought struck the Lieutenant. He peered long and carefully over the parapet. The last wisps of mist were shredding away and the jumble of torn ground and trenches and wire in the German lines was plainly visible. “Look,” said the Lieutenant. “Three or four hundred yards behind their line—hanging on some wire. That’s my coat....” VI SEEING RED THE Mess, having finished reading the letters just brought in, were looking through the home papers. Harvey, who used to be a bank clerk, giggled over a page in _Punch_ and passed it round. “Pretty true, too, isn’t it?” he said. The page was one of those silly jolly little drawings by Bateman of men with curly legs, and the pictures showed typical scenes from the old life of an average City clerk, trotting to business, playing dominoes, and so on, and the last one of a fellow tearing over the trenches in a charge with a real teeth-gritted, blood-in-his-eye look, and the title of the lot was “It’s the Same Man.” Everyone grinned at it and said “Pretty true,” or something like that. “It reminds me ...” said the Australian. Now this is the Australian’s story, which he said he had got from one of the fellows in the show. For the truth or untruth I give no guarantee, but just tell the tale for what it’s worth. Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of the _Punch_ picture. When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be—well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anything more dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.