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Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth
chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the
wind, after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun.
One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying
sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers,
and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities
had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an
amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they
were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a
wonderful simplicity of youth and the gift of laughter.
I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the gas-
masks which none of us ever left behind when we went near the
fighting-line. That horror of war on the western front was new to
them.
Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the gas-
masks seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the
headgear in the fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters
.


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