France, December 20th.

A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a man—an educated man—if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund. "Certainly not," was the reply. "The men have every comfort in the trenches."

That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably angry—the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hardships for his mother's sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army calls "eyewash"—a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not there.

As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as long as history lasts. It is to some extent past history now—to what extent I do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.

I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm—gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner—yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher—take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit. Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with—on his back—all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees—sometimes up to his waist—along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After many hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no grass about it—nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm—whatever weather comes—and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And this is what our men have had to go through.

The longed-for relief comes at last—a change to other shell-battered areas in support or reserve—and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I can hear them as I write—it is the first longed-for gloriously bright day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world—there has never yet been anything to approach it except at Verdun.

Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front—there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hardships undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as "artillery and trench mortar activity"—after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as "war de luxe."

It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases, issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and hardship without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day—and I doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him—whether he will, at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.

What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter. For our grand men—and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times—the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A. and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region. In the areas to which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.

But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist, shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.