pressed into service as emergency-man,
nurse, and general bottle-washer for three over-crowded tents, I
flung into my new duties a zeal which ended by undoing me. Drummers
might be wanted at the front, but meanwhile the hospital-camp was
undoubtedly short-handed. And my hopes faded as, with the approach
of Christmas, wagon after wagon laden with sick soldiers crawled back
to us from the low-lying country over which Lord Wellington had
spread his forces between the Agueda and the upper Mondego--men
shuddering with ague or bent double with rheumatism, and all bringing
down the same tales of short food, sodden quarters, and arrears of
pay. For three days, they told me, the army had gone without bread,
and the commissariat crawled over unthreatened roads at the pace of
five to nine miles a day. They cursed the war, the Government at
home, above all the Portuguese and everything in Portugal; and yet
their hardships seemed heaven to me in comparison with the hospital
in which, though its duties were frequently disgusting, I had
plenty to eat and nothing to complain of but over-work.

It was not until Christmas that I won my release, and by a singular
accident.

It happened that after nightfall on the 23rd of December an ambulance
train arrived of six wagons, all full of sick demanding instant
attention; and, close upon these, four other wagons laden with
cavalrymen, wounded more or less severely in a foraging excursion
beyond the Agueda, which had brought them into conflict with a casual
party of Marmont's dragoons. The weather was bitterly cold; the men,
apart from this, were unfit for so long a journey and should have
been attended to promptly at their own headquarters. To make matters
worse, one of the wagons had been overturned six miles back on the
frozen road, and the assistant-surgeon who, owing to the seriousness
of the business, had been sent down in attendance, lost his balance
completely. Three of the poor fellows had succumbed as they lay, of
cold, wounds and exhaustion, and a dozen others were in desperate
case.

Our surgeons went to work at once, and until midnight I attended
on them, preparing the lint, washing the blood-stained instruments,
changing the water in the pails, and performing other necessary
but more gruesome tasks which I need not particularise. At midnight
the young cavalry surgeon, who had been freely dosed with brandy,
professed himself ready to take over the minor casualties. The