t having their wounds dressed, knowing that the best they had to
hope for was a bullet. That the chances were they would die of
starvation or exposure, and yet again and again would they refuse to be
taken until we should look to see if there was not some one alive in a
neighboring shell-hole. They would tell us to "look in the drain, or
among those bushes over there." During the day they had heard a groan.
A groan, mind you, and there were men there with legs off, and arms
hanging by a skin, and men sightless, with half their face gone, with
bowels exposed, and every kind of unmentionable wounds, yet some one
had groaned. Why, some had gritted teeth on bayonets, others had
stuffed their tunics in their mouths, lest they should groan. Some one
had written of the Australian soldier in the early part of the war,
"_that they never groan_," and these men who had read that would rather
die than not live up to the reputation that some newspaper
correspondent had given them.

I lay for half an hour with my arms around the neck of a boy within a
few yards of a German "listening post," while the man who was with me
went back to try and find a stretcher. He told me he had neither
mother nor friend, was brought up in an orphanage, and that no one
cared whether he lived or died. But our hearts _rubbed_ as we lay
there, and we vowed lifelong friendship. It does not take long to make
a friend under those circumstances, but he died in my arms and I do not
know _his_ name.

There was another man who was anxious about his money-belt; perhaps it
contained something more valuable than money. I went back for it,
stuffing it in my pocket, and then forgot all about it. When I thought
of it again the belt was gone, and the owner had gone off to hospital.
I do not know who he was, and maybe he thinks I have his belt still.

One of the most self-forgetful actions ever performed was by Sergeant
Ross. We found a man on the German barbed wire, who was so badly
wounded that when we tried to pick him up, one by the shoulders and the
other by the feet, it almost seemed that we would pull him apart. The
blood was gushing from his mouth, where he had bitten through lips and
tongue, so that he might not jeopardize, by groaning, the chances of
some other man who was less badly wounded than he. He begged us to put
him out of his misery, but we were determined we would get him his
chance, though we did not expect him to live. But the sergea