World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front; World War, 1914-1918 -- Great Britain
Rally round the banner of your country,
Rally round the banner of your King.
On land or sea,
Wherever you be,
Keep your eye on Germany.
For England, home and beauty,
Have no cause to fear.
Should old acquaintance be forgot?
No, No--No, No, No.
Australia will be there,
Australia will be there.
_2nd Verse._
With Kitchener in our Army
And French in our cavalry fine,
You bet those German bandsmen
Are in for a lively time.
And there's Winston Churchill
To guide our Navy grand;
With this fine lot we'll make it hot
For the poor old Fatherland.
_Chorus._
_3rd Verse._
We don't forget South Africa
When England was at war;
Australian Light Horsemen, my boys,
Were always to the fore.
Archie Norris and Billy Cook
Have now all kissed the Book.
_Chorus._
CHAPTER III.
BOELCKE'S LAND OF PROMISE.
On the 28th of October, six Halberstadters and Aviatiks attacked two
English aviators in the neighbourhood of Pozières. During the fight six
fresh enemy machines came to the assistance of their friends. At the
end of five minutes of furious fighting two German machines collided.
Pieces of the machines fell, and one of them descended toward the East.
The fight lasted 15 minutes, at the end of which time all the enemy
machines were driven off.
It is probable that it was during this fight that Captain Boelcke was
killed. It was, in fact, at this date that the German wireless stated
that Boelcke had been killed owing to a collision in the air.
In a letter which he wrote to a friend a few days before his tragic and
still unaccountable death, Boelcke, the best-known and most successful
of the German aviators, said:
"The Somme front is a positive land of promise. The sky is filled with
English airmen."
Boelcke expressed, under the guise of a kind of sporting
self-congratulation, the astonishment of his fellows at the way in
which the British flying service had developed.
A large number of documents found upon German prisoners give evidence
of a no less striking kind upon the same point.
"Our air service," says one of them, "practically ceased to exist
during the Battle of the Somme. At times the sky seemed black with
enemy machines."
Another says:
"We are so inferior to our opponents in our air service that when
hostile machines fly over our own lines we have no recourse but to hide
ourselves in the earth. Now and then a few of our machines attempt to
go up, but it is only a drop in the bucket."
[Illustration: 6. A BRITISH AEROPLANE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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