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All around, as far as one could see, amid the white snow and with lofty pine-trees towering above them, extended the hospital-tents, and in these lay the sick, the wounded, the dying. Hospital-supplies were scarce, our rations of the plainest articles, which, during the first years of the war, were considered absolute necessaries, had become priceless luxuries.
Stretchers!"; the naked white men splashing and swimming in the bay; the swoop of a couple of skinny vultures over the burning white sand of the Salt Lake bed to the stinking and decomposing body of a shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in the willow-thickets at the bottom of Chocolate Hill; a torn and bullet-pierced French warplane stranded on the other side of Lala Baba lying over at an angle like a wounded white seabird; the rush for the little figure bringing in "the mails" in a sack over his shoulder; the smell of iodine and iodoform round the hospital-tents; the long wobbling moan of the Turkish long-distance shells, and the harmless "Z-z-z-eee-e-e-o-ooop!" of their "dud" shells which buried themselves so often in the sand without exploding; the tattered, begrimed and sunken-eyed appearance of men who had been in the trenches for three weeks at a stretch; the bristling unshaven chins, and the craving desire for "woodbines"; the ingrained stale blood on my hands and arms from those fearful gaping wounds, and the red-brown blood-stain patches on my khaki drill clothes; the pestering curse of those damnable Suvla Bay flies and the lice with which every officer and man swarmed.
"Of Texas City a flourishing town of four or five thousand houses nothing remained but heaps of bricks and splintered wood, sodden bales of cotton and bits of household furniture, scattered over the plain; not a standing habitation within miles, nor any shelter for the crowds above-mentioned, except two or three hospital-tents, hastily set up for the sick and wounded, but inadequate for their accommodation.
After the battle is over, and the enemy has fled, beaten, shattered, and in disorder, we carry our ambulances to the gory field, and take up the wounded, friend and foe alike. The severely injured we attend to at once, dressing their wounds on the spot, and then we place them all on our beds, and take them to our hospital-tents for treatment." This had been the old man's practice in many wars.
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