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 two hospital surgeons, by this time worn out, accepted the offer and withdrew. No one thought of me.
I understand that about an hour later as I sat waiting for orders on the edge of an unoccupied bed (from which a dead man had been carried out a little before midnight) I must have dropped across it in a sleep of utter exhaustion. It appears too that the young doctor, finding me there a short while after, carried me out and laid me on the ground with my head against the hut. He never admitted this: for I had been attending upon him, off and on, since his arrival, and that he failed to recognise me might have been awkwardly accounted for. But I cannot believe (as certainly I do not remember) that of my own motion I crawled outside the hut and stretched myself on the frozen ground, or that, exhausted as I was, I could have walked ten yards in my sleep.
At all events, the chill of the bitter dawn awoke me there; and with a yawn I stretched out both arms. My right hand encountered—what?— the body of a man stretched beside me! Still dazed and numb, I rolled over to my elbow, raised myself a little and peered into his face.
It was pinched and cold. Its eyes stared straight up at the dawn. From it my gaze travelled slowly over the faces of three other men laid out accurately alongside of him, feet to feet, head to head.
I sank back, not yet comprehending, gazed up at the grey sky for a while, then slowly raised myself on my left elbow.
On that side lay a score of sleepers, all flat on their backs, and all equally still. Then I understood and leapt up with a scream. It was a line of corpses, and I had been laid out beside them for burial at dawn.
A sleepy orderly—a friend of mine—poked his head out of the doorway of the next hut. I pointed to the spot where I had been lying.
"They must ha' done it in the dark," he said, slowly regarding the bodies.
I suppose that my story, spreading about the camp, at length penetrated to headquarters: for on Christmas Day, a transport arriving and landing some light guns and a detachment of artillery, I was sent forward with them towards Villa del Ciervo on the left bank of the Agueda, where, by all accounts, the 52nd were posted.
Our battery was but six light six-pounders; yet even with these we moved over the frozen and slippery roads at a snail's pace, the men tearing their boots to ribbons as they hung on to the drag-ropes—for the artillery captain was a martinet and refused to lock the wheels, declaring that it would damage the carriages. Of damage to his men he never seemed to think: and I, being fool enough to volunteer— though my weight on the rope could have counted for next to nothing— found myself on the second day without heels to my shoes, and on the third without shoes at all. Nor is it likely that I had ever reached the Agueda in time for the fighting had we not been met at Coimbra by an order to leave our guns in the magazine there and hurry forward to Ciudad Rodrigo, where my comrades were required to work the 24-pounders which composed the bulk of Lord Wellington's siege-train.