The other factors to be taken into consideration are important ones. The first was their fine youthful pride in the opportunity of serving side by side with the soldiers of the Mother Country, and of the proud European nations allied to her. There will always be generous rivalry between the troops of two great nations fighting side by side in a just cause. But the spirit in which the Australasians went out to the service of the Mother Empire goes deeper and further still. It holds nothing questioning or calculated, it is the conduct of men who hail as a proud privilege the opportunity of laying down their lives for the underlying principles on which the structure of the British Empire is reared. The danger note had only to be sounded and these men hastened to record their eagerness to serve; more, they well knew why they were so keen. With them duty and inclination walked hand in hand.
Finally, the people of Australasia are well assured of the justice of the cause for which they fight. Nowhere was more interest displayed in the speeches that explained the causes to which the war is due, nowhere is there a public better informed of the efforts made to preserve peace, and of the deliberate flouting of them by Germany. Small nations themselves, the Southern Britons fully comprehend the danger to the small nations of Europe from the grasping aggression of their strong unscrupulous neighbours. They claim as part of their heritage those pages of British history which tell how gloriously Great Britain has espoused the cause of the weak in the past. There is no quarrel in which the men of Australasia would more gladly take up arms with the Mother Country than one for the innocent weak against the guilty strong. And such a quarrel, they are well persuaded, is the root cause of the Great War in which they are now fighting.
FILLING THE GAPS
[CHAPTER XXIV]
FILLING THE GAPS
From Blackboy to Mena, from Mena to where
They drew the first blood with the bayonet,
They hoisted the heathen foe out of his lair