Their clean-cut hatchet faces, sunbaked, 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. This music, this place of thoughtfulness, had made something break in his heart⁠ ⁠… Some of our young officers, but not many, knelt on the cane chairs and prayed, face in hands. French officers crossed themselves and their medals tinkled as they walked up the aisles.