Volume 2: Letters written on active service, M-W, 1914-1919 - Page 37

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[Page 37]

[The individual pages of this two-page spread are not in chronological order. Transcribed as they should be read; see image for details.]
days and eight nights I live amongst them, many of the twenty-four hours round they designated quiet. A purely relative statement this must be because neither night nor day when I was awake did the rifles cease to fire, the machine guns fail to ring out their savage rat tat tat, or the Cannons to with a boom or bang hurl their missiles on the journey of destruction. These men, the farmers, the station hands, the ordinary workers, and their officers from our sunny land were playing one part like unto seasoned soldiers inured to the sounds of the battle field and the carnage of war. Without seeing no one can appreciate the work & the fighting done by those few down under.

Outposts of Empire they rivalling the Trojan and long-haired well greaved Greeks, who not far from Anzac more than three thousand years ago fought for the fair Hellen and the City of Troy. Then Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles, Ulysses & the rest wrote imperishable names upon the scroll of fame. Surely there will come mongst us a modern Homer who will put in poetry or prose the acts of our heroes & in the form of a Classic hand their personalities and their places of origin to those who will be alive centuries tens of them and hundreds of them in the dim hereafter. Truly the prowess then as now is gift from Heaven yet is it none less laudable. Well might they their favouring fortunes bless whom those bloody fights

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