"Yes, they are all right if you keep them busy. But they are the very devil in rest camp. Now in Cairo——"
But the table refuses to hear the story of Cairo again, because it is not a very pleasant story.
The conclusion I came to is that the British officer had really a very soft spot in his heart for the "wild Colonial boys"—Canadians and Australians. I was always being appealed to, as knowing Australia, to "explain" the Anzac, which I did at great length on various occasions, and here is the substance of it all:
The Anzac striding—or limping—along with rakish hat and challenging glance, for the first time brought Australasia actually home to the Mother Country. These Australasians, the men of the Bush, were as remarkable, as significant almost, as the Dacians in the army of another Imperial nation two thousand years ago. Easily can they be picked out. They walk the streets with a slightly obvious swagger. When they are awed a little, it is a point of honour not to show it. When they are critical a little, it peeps out. Two by two, they keep one another in countenance and are fairly comfortable. Catch one alone and you may see in his eyes a hunger for a mate, a need for some other Anzac. For all his bravura air, the Anzac has no great self-confidence; and he has a child's shy fear of making himself ridiculous by a false step. The same fear makes him difficult to know. He will often set up, as a protective barrier against a real knowledge of him, a stubborn taciturnity, or a garrulous flow of what Australasians call "skite" and Londoners call "swank."
In pre-war days an Australian in England might have felt himself a little of the barbarian in so smooth a comity, where people loved moderately and hated very moderately; walked always by paths; were somewhat ashamed of their own merits and suavely tolerant of others' demerits; and were nervous of allowing patriotism to become infected with the sin of pride. But England at war understood them better—the Anzacs, the young of the British. The young of the British, not of the English only, though that is the master element of the breed. The Anzac is a close mixture of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh colonists, with practically no foreign taint.
There is, however, a wild strain in the mixture. One of the first great tasks of Australasia was to take the merino sheep of Spain and make a new sheep of it—a task brilliantly carried out. A concurrent task was to take black sheep from the British Isles and make good white stock out of them. The success in this was just as complete. The "rebels" of the Mother Country—Scottish crofters, Irish agrarians, English Chartists and poachers—mostly needed only full elbow room to become useful men. Even for the Micawbers a land of lots of room was regenerative.
Was it Charles Lamb's quip that the early population of the British Colonies should be good "because it was sent out by the best judges?" That was a truth spoken in jest. The first wild strain was of notable value to a new nation in the making. It came to Australasia not only from the original settlers but also from the rushes to the goldfields. And—note here the first sign that the Anzac people were to be dominated by the British spirit and were to keep the law even while they forgot conventions—there was never a Judge Lynch in an Australasian mining camp. The King's writ and Trial by Jury stood always.
The Anzac started thus with good blood. To carry a study of the type to the next stage, to note how the breed was influenced by environment, it is necessary at the outset to put away the idea that the Australasian people are engaged, to the exclusion of all other interests, in the task of subduing the wildnesses of their continent. They have done, continue to do, their pioneer work well, but have always kept some time for the arts and humanities. To ignore that fact is, I think, a common mistake, even in the days when every European opera-house of note had heard an Australasian singer or musician, every European salon had shown Australian pictures, and there was even a tiny representation of Australian Art in pre-war Montreuil.
"Does anybody in Australia then have time to read Greek?" a schoolmaster's wife in England asked once with surprise.
She was answered with another question: "Who is the great Greek scholar of the day?"