The Trenches here have to be Built Above the Ground in Breastwork A Main Street of Pozieres The Church Pozieres The Windmill of Pozieres The Barely Recognisable Remains of a Trench The Tumbled Heap of Bricks and Timber which the World Knows as Mouquet Farm "Past the Mud-Heaps Scraped by the Road Gangs" [Illustration: Rough sketch showing some of the German defences of Pozieres and the direction of the Australian attacks between July 22 and September 4, 1916. (From Pozieres to Mouquet Farm is just over a mile.)] LETTERS FROM FRANCE CHAPTER I A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING _France, April 8th, 1916._ 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 of sunburnt faces upturned towards a speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above. Beside the speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as proud of those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly. Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats' crews, and about someone who was still absent--just that broken fragment in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around the world. A big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours away from us upon the waters. Could it be about her that these personages of the ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards we heard that it had not been an Australian or any other transport. Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye watching for us too, just above the water, and always waiting--waiting--waiting--. It would have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere explosion. But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it a thought. The strong, tanned, clean-shaven faces under the old slouch hats were all gazing up in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the right thing.