Beginning with the Anglo-French offensive on August 8th, the five divisions of the Australians in their "leap-frogging" advance--and they were very expert at "leap-frogging"--had not been out of line as a Corps until they had fought their way clear across the devastated region from the high-water mark of the German tidal wave of March to the point from which it had started. In the free stride which they had brought overseas from their island continent thousands of miles away, now guided by a veteran's wisdom and cunning, they had won back all they had fought for on these Somme fields with an enemy whose measure they had always taken--an enemy who they knew now could never fight on the offensive again. They had suffered for four years the fatigue, the shell-fire, the machine-gun fire, the gas, which our army was to know for a brief period of intensity. Long service and army discipline, accepted as a means to an end, had no more influence in making them militaristic than a course in boxing changes the anatomy of the kangaroo. They were ever the Australians. Though the British had regained what they had lost in the spring, they were only back before the line to which Hindenburg had given his name, after he came with his Ludendorff from their victories in the east to prove that the western front was not necessarily the grave of German military reputations. German staff experts had chosen the ground which they had fortified at leisure behind their old Bapaume defenses during the winter of 1916-1917. German industry was then at its height, and German material was ample to carry out the plans for that elaborate system which was advertised by German propaganda as impregnable. In those days when all offensives in the west had failed, many military experts were inclined to accept this view.