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Updated: May 22, 2025
The dining-room was empty in five minutes. We who remained were faced with the prospect of a concert without an audience. But our sergeant-major met the emergency. He hurried to a neighbouring camp and somehow managed to borrow two hundred men. The concert party was greatly pleased, but said that the Emergency Stretcher-bearers did not look as old and dilapidated as they had been led to expect.
Imagine the plight of the wounded, lying on the slopes of Wellington Ridge and elsewhere, racked with pain, and tortured almost to madness by flies and thirst, exposed for hours to the merciless rays of the sun, until the stretcher-bearers, working though they were like men inspired, had the opportunity to carry them away to the rear. And then, what?
The whole battle in this sector was really over, and I stopped the men under cover from moving out into the open. In the late afternoon the survivors of the little group in front crawled back to safety. The dead were gathered in by the devoted stretcher-bearers under Sergeant Mort, during the evening. One party, under Corporal F. White, had alone penetrated to within a few yards of the redoubt.
"I will bring sheets," she said, and did not herself enter. The stretcher-bearers put down their burden and gave a deep breath, gazing round them in surprise. The room was square. The bright daylight streamed in through two windows that reached to the ceiling. The floor was beautifully inlaid with wood of different colours, and carved oak panelling covered the walls.
'French no good, Americans no good. The stretcher-bearers walked on without answering. The Boche began again. 'The English think they're going to win the war, they're wrong. You Americans think you've come to win, you're wrong. "Then the American spoke for the first and last time. 'You think you're going to be carried to hospital, you're wrong. Put him down, Digger! And that ended that.
A communication trench which I visited, when paying an afternoon call at a dug-out, was wide enough to admit a pony and cart, and, as it has to serve to bring up ration-parties and stretcher-bearers as well as reliefs, it is made as wide as is consistent with its main purpose, which is to protect the approach and to localise the effect of shell-fire as much as possible, the latter object being effected by frequent "traversing."
And he was within four hundred yards of the child's arm and of the spot where the procession of stretcher-bearers had passed. One thought gradually gained ascendancy in his mind: "I am saved!" It became exultant: "I might have been blown to bits, but I am saved!"
In the filmy blue overhead a lark sang rapturously, pouring out its soul in gladness. Margaret was in the hall when the first of the long line of stretcher-bearers arrived. As each stretcher was brought in, a surgeon made a brief examination of the wounded man, and he passed through one or other of the wide doorways opening out on either side of the hall.
I lay inertly as I was placed thereon and borne out of the chamber. Other stretcher-bearers were walking ahead. We passed through the engine room where mechanics were at work on the damaged liquid air engine. My stretcher was placed on a little car which moved swiftly along the tunnel.
Then a bullet said the indescribable word that means 'hit' and Duffy found that the other half of the machine had stopped suddenly and collapsed in a little heap. Somewhere along the line a voice called softly 'Stretcher-bearers, and almost on the word two men and a stretcher materialised out of the darkness and a third was stooping over the broken machine.
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