. . . You see what an invitation to grief is friendship with the regiments of foot. . . . They are touchingly profane about the dead friend . . . . They see that a cross comes from the battalion carpenter, or the especial friend like little ‘W——’ makes a cross himself and carves an ornate rising sun on it—but they are movingly profane about it all, employing all those proper expedients of the Digger for the disguising of deep feeling—of the exhibition of which the boys are so timid that they have evolved a language compound of blasphemy and catch phrases in which they can unpack their hearts without seeming to be guilty of the weakness of emotion.”
The Mate.
Tunnellers under German Territory.
“The tunneller’s activity is only heard of when the world is deafened by the blowing of a mine that he has prepared through months of silent, modest and retiring labour; labour that in its nature is coy and shy of observation. A form of warfare with its stratagems and incredible counter stratagems . . . for which the Australian miner has peculiar advantages . . . . to these strange places he brings all that was characteristic of him in the Lady Berry at home . . . .
“It was our tunnellers who prepared a little show which an English battalion carried out, and the night of the touch off a battalion commander said to a tunnelling officer, ‘I think I should tell you that I am given to understand that some of your men are going to attempt to go over with us to-night.’ Which it is understood that the tunnellers did contrive to do, for the next day a tunneller showed ‘P——’ a fine Fritz watch. ‘You don’t get them tunnelling, sir,’ he said. ‘The infantry will do me after this.’”
Tunnellers under German Territory.