These men who dwell in France are creating for Australia a national sentiment, and gaining for themselves a wide outlook in their travels and accomplishments afield. At present the war waged ten thousand miles away from the Southern Continent is welding together the people's outlook, aspiration and sympathy. Men from all parts of the continent, from out back and from the sea-coast are grouped together in one great brotherhood, fighting for a common cause, and the ground over which they fight is the one central point on which all eyes of Australia are directed. Back home many voices are raised in declamation or praise of this or that political move or industrial policy, but on one point there is complete and unanimous acquiescence, and that one point is the prosecution of the war towards a successful conclusion. It must be waged till the end, until Germany is beaten and the wrong done to the world, to France and Belgium, righted.
And so the Australians make great battle in the mud of France and Flanders, fighting with heroic persistence, carving the way to victory. As we remember what the Diggers have done at Gallipoli, Polygon, Pozieres and Peronne, we may quote the famous couplet from the prologue to "The Revenge," played by a company of convicts in Sydney, 1796, and thereto add two lines of our own making:
True patriots all, for be it understood
We left our country for our country's good.
Their children we and back again, we feel
That we've returned for that country's weal.
L' Envoi
(Written on the day the British Fleet entered the Dardanelles)
From Suvla Cove to Sed-el-Bahr