Energy books

Their
clean-cut hatchet faces, sun--baked, tanned by rain and wind, their
simple blue-gray eyes, the fine, strong grace of their bodies, as they
stood at ease in this place of history, struck me as being wonderfully
like all that one imagines of those English knights and squires--
Norman-English--who rode through France with the Black Prince. It is
as though Australia had bred back to the old strain. Our own English
soldiers were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and neat, not
such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked up the aisles,
standing in groups where a service was in progress, watching the
movements of the priests, listening to the choir and organ with
reverent, dreamy eyes. Some of them--country lads--thought back, I
fancy, to some village church in England where they had sung hymns
with mother and sisters in the days before the war. England and that
little church were a long way off now, perhaps all eternity away. I
saw one boy standing quite motionless, with wet eyes, without self-
consciousness.


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