HOMEWARD BOUND
As soon as Hoddinott and Pike had left me, two other stretcher bearers carried me about two hundred yards farther to a rough shelter made of poles laid across supports composed of sandbags. This was the dressing station. On top of the poles, sandbags made it impervious to overhead shelling. On three sides it was closed in, but the side nearest the beach was open. From where my stretcher was placed I could just catch a glimpse of the Ægean Sea and of the ships. Men on stretchers were lined up in rows on the ground. Here and there a man groaned, but most of the men were gazing at the roof, with set faces. Some who were only slightly wounded were sitting up on stretchers while Red Cross men bandaged up their legs or feet. A doctor was working away methodically and rapidly. A little to the right another shelter housed the men who were being sent to hospital with dysentery, enteric, or typhoid. As soon as I was brought in, the doctor came to me. "I'll do this one right away," he said to one of his assistants. The assistant stripped the blanket from me and cut off the portions of the blood-stained shirt still remaining. As he did so, something dropped on the ground. The Red Cross man picked it up.
"Here's the bullet that hit you," he said, putting it beside me on the stretcher. "It dropped out of your shirt. It just got through you and stuck in your shirtsleeve."
"You'd better get him a little bag to keep his things in," said the doctor.
The Red Cross man produced a bag, took my pay book, and everything he found in my pocket, and put them in it, then tied them to the stretcher. By this time I was ready for the doctor to begin work. That doctor knew his business. In a very few minutes he had probed and cut and cleaned the wound, and adjusted a new bandage. The bleeding had stopped by this time. He asked me the circumstances of being hit. He told me to grip his hand and squeeze. I tried it with my right hand but could do nothing; then I tried the left hand and succeeded a little better. The doctor looked grave when I failed to grip with my right hand, but brightened a little when I gripped with my left. All the time he talked to me genially. That did me nearly as much good as the surgical attention he gave me. He was a Canadian, he told me. At the outbreak of the war he had been taking post-graduate courses at Cambridge University in England. The University sent several hospital units to the front, and he had come with this one. He knew Canada and the States pretty thoroughly.
"Where do you come from?" he asked me.
"Newfoundland," I told him. "But I live in the United States."
"What part?" he asked.
"Cambridge, Massachusetts," I told him.
"Oh," he said, "that's where Harvard University is."