None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near Polygon Ridge, which is the ground most wanted by the enemy, and the nearest seems to have been yesterday afternoon, when some of the Australian boys with whom I talked to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the movement of men for a minute of two, and after that a fury of shells which fell into the wood and filled it with flame and smoke.
"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived through that," said one of these lads. "If any Fritz got out of that without being cracked he must have had the luck of Old Harry."
There were many of these Australian boys among whom I went to-day before they had cleaned themselves of the dirt of battle, and while they were still on fire with the emotion of their amazing adventure. Some of them had escaped only by enormous luck. I talked with one stretcher-bearer, a fine, big, bullet-headed fellow with an unshaven chin and a merry smile, who was astounded to find himself alive. He had spent the day and night bandaging wounded, and, with his mates, carrying them down to the dressing-station, a mile and more back. All the time he walked and worked with bursting shells about him. They knocked out several of his mates, but left him untouched. They killed two or three of the wounded on his stretchers going down, but did not scratch him. They blew up dug-outs just as he had gone out of them, and trenches through which he made his way. He was buried in earth flung up by heavy shells, and he fell many times into deep craters, and men dropped all round him, but to-day he still had a whole skin and a queer, lingering smile, in which there is a look of wonderment because of his escape.
An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles and the Somme and Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Australian, with a delicate, clean-cut face, thoughtful and grave, with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a wounded lad on to a stretcher when a shell came over his head, killed the boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, sixty men and a German battalion staff in their headquarter dug-outs below Polygon Wood.