We have been here long enough now to discover the differences between this front and the old fighting line in Gallipoli. The rain has been heavier... The trenches are made passable by being floored with a wooden pathway which runs on piles... Sometimes, the water rises in the communication trenches so that the boards float or disappear, and if you happen to step into an interval... you may quite well sink into your waist in thin, clay mud... [The] rear of the line is a morass of foul-smelling clay... 

In Anzac, we never had the timber for this... The soil there was dry and held well, and the trenches were deep and very elaborate... In France, there are stretches of line where it is impossible to dig a trench at all... You see nothing from weekend to weekend except two muddy walls and the damp, dark interior of a small dug-out. 

... But of all the differences, by far, the greatest is that our troops here have a beautiful country... [and] are amongst a people like their own, living in villages and cottages and paddocks not so different from those of their own childhood. 

In Gallipoli, there were brigade headquarters in the actual fire trenches... The troops in the [French] trenches themselves, can be brought back every few days into more or less normal country, and have always the prospect before them at the end of a few months of a stay in surroundings that are completely free from shell or rifle fire... 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 25 April 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 33-35. 

I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that they were proud to fight by the side of them. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 26 July 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 101. 

That night, shortly after dark, there broke out the most fearful bombardment I have ever seen. As one walked towards the battlefield, the weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out... About midnight, our field artillery lashed down its shrapnel upon the German front line... A few minutes later, this fire lifted, and the Australian attack was launched. 

... The first trench was a wretchedly shallow affair... Most of the Germans in it were dead — some of them had been lying there for days. ... Other sections found no recognisable trench at all, but a maze of shell craters and tumbled rubbish, or simply a ditch reduced to white powder. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 26 July 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 102, 105-6. 

When I went through Boisselle, I thought it was the limit that desolation could reach... But for sheer desolation, it will not compare with Pozières. 

On the top of a gently rising hill... was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery under the shady trees, its orchards and picturesque village houses... 

The bombardment shattered Pozières. Its buildings were scattered as you would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged... all that remain are charred tree stumps, standing like a line of broken posts. 

On the whole face of the country, shells have ploughed up the land literally as with a gigantic plough, so that there is more red and brown earth than green. From the distance... the country is wholly red. 

But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place [the village] itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years... Then, take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider.... and there, you have Pozières. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 1 August 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 111-4. 

That [Pozières] is the country in which our boys are fighting the greatest battle the Australians have ever fought. Of the men whom you find there, what can one say? Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian joke... holding fast through anything that men can imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains, doing their job all the time... without fuss, but steadily, because it is their work. They are not heroes; they do not want to be thought or spoken of as heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do it. And pray God, Australians in days to come will be worthy of them. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 1 August 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 116. 

Hour after hour—day and night—with increasing intensity as the days went on, he rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield for miles around—that reeking village. 

... Now, he would place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses as through a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle... ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosives...

Day and night, the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon, as if they were fighting the Germans hand-to-hand—building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once, but again and again and again. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 26 July 1916. Letters from France. Cassell and Company: Melbourne, p. 107-8. 

You have no idea of the hell and horror of a great advance, old fellow, and I hope you never will have. We fought and lived as we stood, day and night, without even overcoats to put on at night, and with very little food. 

The place was not littered but covered with dead, and as we were under continuous fire and were moving about a lot, and when we were in a very narrow, shallow trenches, we could do no burying. The last meal I had was one I shook from a dead German. 

I won't give you my idea of war. But if I ever come back, I'll tell you. Be content to know that it is bloody awful. I've stuck at it all right so far, not lost my nerve, not gone mad, and not fallen down on my job. And I've had some pretty rotten ones. 

Source: John Raws, 23 August 1916. Letter. Department of Veteran Affairs: Anzac Portal. URL: https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/stories/australians-wartime/why-should-you-people-home-not-know-horrors-war. 

The Australian casualties have been very heavy—fully 50 percent in our brigade, for the ten or eleven days. I lost, in three days, my brother and two best friends, and in all six out of seven of all my officer friends (perhaps a score in number) who went into the scrap—all killed. 

Not one was buried, and some died in great agony. It was impossible to help the wounded at all in some sectors. We could fetch them in but could not get them away. And often, we had to put them out on the parapet to permit movement in the shallow, narrow crooked trenches. The dead were everywhere.

Source: John Raws, 12 August 1916. Letter. Department of Veteran Affairs: Anzac Portal. URL: https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/stories/australians-wartime/why-should-you-people-home-not-know-horrors-war. 

One or two of my friends stood splendidly, like granite rocks, round which the seas stormed in vain. They were all junior officers. But many other fine men broke to pieces. Everyone called it shell shock... 

One feels on a battlefield such as this, one can never survive, or that if the body lives, the brain must go forever. For the horrors one sees and the never-ending shock fo the shells i more than can be borne. Hell must be a home to it.

The Gallipoli veterans here say that the Peninsula was a happy picnic to this push. We've read of Verdun—they say this knocks it hollow. My battalion has been at it for eight days, and one-third of it is left—all shattered at that.

And they're sticking it still, incomparable heroes all. We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we're back a bit, we can't sleep for our own guns. I have one puttnee, a dead man's helmet, another dead man's gas protector, a dead man's bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men's blood and partly splattered with a comrade's brains. It is horrible but why should you people at home not know. 

Source: John Raws, 4 August 1916. Letter. Department of Veteran Affairs: Anzac Portal. URL: https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/stories/australians-wartime/why-should-you-people-home-not-know-horrors-war. 

... There is only one way out of this war for an infantryman and that is on his back; either sick, wounded, or dead. There is no going back to cheering crowds — no marching through London streets and ovations in Australian ports. 

They will be put at it to fight and fight and fight again — until, if not in this battle, then in the next each man gets his bullet... They are looking down the long road straight to the end — they can see it plain enough now, and they know that there is no turning [back]. 

Source: C. E. W. Bean, 3 October 1916. Diary 60. Australian War Museum. URL: https://www.awm.gov.au/official-histories/first_world_war/volIII_introduction.