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Long before the end of this great battle the Australian soldier had revealed to himself, to his own officers, and to a few of those outsiders who watched him closely, what manner of fighter he was. He had not yet the astonishing mastery of the soldier's craft which marked him in 1918. But he had scattered to the winds once and for all the notion often reiterated, that an Australian force would be ineffective through lack of discipline. In flame of the whitest heat was tested the discipline of this new force, raised suddenly from a people unaccustomed to restraint, naturally haters of the system of cast-iron subordination on which most armies are trained. It was not the discipline of habit which made either Australians and New Zealanders endure. What motive sustained them? It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness; to be the sort of man who would fail when the line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance; to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own unit's work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier's task and had lacked the grit to carry it through - that was the prospect which these men could not face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood. Standing upon that alone, when help failed and hope faded, when the end loomed clear in front of them, when the whole world seemed to crumble and the heaven to fall in, they faced its ruin undismayed. Charles E W Bean
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