A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where we were billeted. On the green door of the house next to it, behind the pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, "Mess—five officers." That was where we were to feed.
"TALKING WITH THE KIDDIES IN THE STREET"
It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant sound—ever so familiar—the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.
And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room, across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.
Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in France.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST IMPRESSION—A COUNTRY WITH EYES
France, April, 1916.