WITH THE AUSTRALIANS

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 21 September 1917, Page 1

WITH THE AUSTRALIANS

HELPED BY "TASTES. JUSTE DAYS IN FLANDEES. The Australians had some great ■ adventures in the Afessines battle. A body of Germans gave trouble in Huns' Walk, pn the Messines road,- where' there was a belt of uncut wire when the Australians arrived there. " Hell!" said the Australians. '"What are we going to do about that?" There was a great shell fire and machinegun fire., and the sight of that wire was disgusting. " Leave it to me," said a young Tank officer. " I guess old Battlebelly can roll that down." He and other tank officers were keen, even at most deadly risks, to do good work with their queer beasts alongside the Australians, for reasons that belong to another story. They did excellent work, and this one at Huns' Walk crawled along the edge of the wire and laid it flat, as its tracks there still show. Another tank was slouching about under heavy shelling in search of strong posts, with the Australian boys close up to its flanks, with their bayonets fixed. Suddenly a burst of flame came from it, and it seemed a doomed thing. But out of the body of the beast came a very cool young man, mounted high, with bits of nhell whistling by his head. He stamped out the tire, and did not hear the comments', of the Australian lads, who said : "Gosh! That fellow is pretty game: he's all' right." Slucli further north another tank came into action with the Australians, near a few old remnants of charred wall and timber, where a. strong post of Germans in concrete . chambers were causing our ti'oops loss and worry. "Anything I can do to help you?" asked the tank "officer, very politely, through the steel trap-door.

" Your machine guns ■would be jolly useful in our trench," said an Australian officer. "We are a bit under strength here." The tank officer was a friend in distress. He dismantled his machine guns, took them into the trench, and fought alongside the Australians until they were relieved. Just west of Van Hove Farm, in a gap between the Australians and English, the Germans got into a place called the Polks Estaminet—don't imagine it as a neat little inn with a penny-in-the-slot piano in the front they had to be driven out by sharp rifle fire. Nest morning one of our men walked into a pocket of 100 Germans, and a young Australian officer was told off with 20 men to bomb them out. There was a battle of bombs, which was very hot while it lasted, and then the Germans bolted off under machine-gun and rifle fire.. Australian patrols went out and brought in 40 wounded Germans, and counted 60 to 80 dead THIRST IN THE BATTLE LINE. Forty years hence (writes Mr Philip G-ibbs, in the * Daily Telegraph') these stories will be told in Sydney and on Australian farms far out in the bush, when, perhaps, the world will have grown wiser and look back to all this war as an inconceivable thing, so that white-haired old men who are now the Australian boys I see about the fields' of France "will* be looked'at with'wonder as men who passed through hell fires and great devilry. On.', the other side of the world the names of a few bits of broken brickwork in a great chaos of shell craters will ba famous and sinister, and these boys now who go back, the lucky ones, will be pointed out as those who fought at Van Hove ls!arm and saw the tank up Huns' Walk. ■ The sun is fierce and hot over Flanders, giving great splendor to this June of war, but baking our troops brown and dry. Up hi the battle line thirst is the great demon hi that shadowless land of craters, where the earth itself is parched and cracked, and where there is a white, blinding glare. ■ On the day of the Messines battle water went np quickly, with two lemons for each man, "to help them through the barrage,", according to a young staff officer, with a bright sense of humor, at the mess table. But there was never too much, and in some places not enough, for the wounded men." whose thirst was like a fire, and yet not greedy, poor chaps, if there was only a little to go round. "Can you spare a drop?" said a group of them—all Australian lads—to a friend of mine, who was going up one day with a kerosene t-in'e full of water to the front line. "Fellows up in the front want it badly," said niy friend, "and I promised to get it there j but if you'll take just a sip-—" Those Australians were all in a muck of wounds and sweat, but they just moistened their lips and passed the water on. One man shook his head, and said: "Take it to the" fellers in front." It was the old Philip Sidney touch by

way of Australia, and it is not rare among all our fighting men-r-lawless chaps when they are on a loose end, but great-hearted children in times like this. A -ROAD PICTURE. All this pageant of war in France and : Flanders is on fire with the sun; and it is wonderful to pass through great stretches of the war zone, as I do most days, and get the picture of it into one's eyes and soul—columns- of men marching, with wet, bronzed faces, through clouds of white dust or through fields where there is a patchwork tapestry of color woven of stretches of clover, drenching the air with its scent, and of . poppies, which spill a scarlet flood down the slopes, and of green wheat and gold-brown earth. •Gunners ride in their shirts, with sleeves, rolled up. About old barns men .work m their? billets, stripped to the belt. Up in the' strafed country of the old salient men sit about the "ruins between spells of work on roads and rails on the shady side of shell-broken walls, dreaming of bottled beer and rivers of cider, and the New Zealanders are as brown as gipsies under, their high felt hats, and never bother about the shady side. The Australians;; who remember Posrieres in winter—though they want to forget—smile in the face of the sun, and come tramping down the middle of the highway hke men who find fife good, and don't give a for what other folks think, which is their way of putting it.