is gammy leg. But indeed we were very lucky. Shells burst on every
side of the aid-post--on right and left, but not on us. This was one of
the rare occasions when I have felt confidence. Dobson and I were far
too busied to worry. Also it seemed hard to believe that a shell would
be allowed to fall on that shattered, helpless suffering. I saw,
without seeing, things that are burnt into memory. We had no morphia,
nothing but bandages. There was a man hit in the head, who just flopped
up and down, seemingly invertebrate as an eel, calling out terribly for
an hour till he died. Another man, also hit in the head--but he
recovered, and I afterwards met him in Bombay--kept muttering, 'Oh
those guns! They go through my head!'

A large body of prisoners was massed in the hollow beside us. When
these marched off, some seventy wounded were sent to me, under the
impression that the place was a regular aid-post. They were horribly
smashed. General Thomson's Brigade (14th Division) had enfiladed them
with artillery fire from the other bank, with dreadful effect. He got
into their reserves, their retreat, their hospitals, and broke them up.
In one place his fire caught a body of Turks massing for a
counter-attack, beneath big bluffs by the water, and heaped the sand
with dead and maimed. These men came with their gaping wounds and
snapped limbs. Private Clifton, a friend of mine, brought bucket after
bucket of water from the river. They drank almost savagely. My inexpert
fingers hurt cruelly as I bandaged them, and they winced and cried. But
the next minute they would stroke my hand, to show they understood good
intentions. They had a great belief in the superiority of our
civilization--at any rate in its medical aspect. They insisted, those
who had been bandaged by the Turkish aid-posts, in tearing off their
bandages--perfectly good ones, but smaller than ours--and on having
new bandages from me. Just when the 5.9's blew us round the corner,
Waller, adjutant of the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., came up and asked if I
could send any one to look at some men just hit by the tornado. Mester
Dobson was as busied as a man could be, his inevitable pipe in his
mouth, so I went with Waller. One man was breathing, his head broken
behind; the others were dead. Beside one of the corpses was a red mass.
I saw, noting the fact automatically and without the least
squeamishness, that it was his brains. We carried the living man in.

In the darkness Dobson