It was market-
day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and
old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their
black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people
scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line
of transport wagons came through the square.
"By Jove! . . . Australians!"
There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance,
but without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of
their own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along
those roads of war.
They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little old
market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor
Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a
boyhood and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the
softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially
for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and
they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though
born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the
little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle
and an old woman's table of colored ribbons.
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