CHAPTER XXXIII
WHY HE IS NOT "THE ANZAC"
France, November 28th.
"You don't call us the Anzacs, do you?" asked the man with the elbow sling appealingly. "You call us just Australians and New Zealanders, don't you?"
I hesitated for a minute or two racking my brain—it seemed to me that once, some months back, I had used that convenient term in a cabled message.
"Oh, don't for goodness sake say you do it, too," said the owner of the elbow sling pathetically. "Isn't Australians good enough?"
"I'm not sure—once—I may have. Not for a long time, anyway. I sometimes speak of the Anzac troops or the Anzac guns."
"Oh, that is all right—Anzac troops—there's no objection to that—we are that," went on the grammarian with the elbow sling, "but there's no such thing as an Anzac—the Anzacs—it's nonsense."
I remember that day well. It was the day before their first entry on the Somme. The man with the elbow sling had stopped a shrapnel pellet one frosty morning eight months before at Anzac; the man who sat next to him had a Turkish shrapnel shell burst between his shins at Hell Spit. They were some of the oldest hands, back again, and about to plunge with the oldest division into the heaviest battle the division had yet faced.