I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again--perhaps men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow, somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at all. When you stand in Pozieres to-day, and are told that you will find the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least sign of movement. Dry shell crater upon shell crater upon shell crater--all bordering one another until some fresh salvo shall fall and assort the old group of craters into a new one, to be reassorted again and again as the days go on. It is the nearest thing to sheer desert that I have seen since certain lonely rides into the old Sahara at the back of Mena Camp two years ago. Every minute or two there is a crash. Part of the desert bumps itself up into huge red or black clouds and subsides again. Those eruptions are the only movement in Pozieres. That is the country in which our boys are fighting the greatest battle Australians have ever fought. Of the men whom you find there, what can one say? Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian joke as often as not; holding fast through anything that man can imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains, doing their job all the time, both new-joined youngsters and old hands, without fuss, but steadily, because it _is_ their work. They are not heroes; they do not want to be thought or spoken of as heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do it. And pray God Australians in days to come will be worthy of them! CHAPTER XVII POZIERES RIDGE _France, August 14th._ You would scarcely realise it from what the world has heard, but I think that the hardest battle ever fought by Australians was probably the battle of Pozieres Ridge.