"Yes," I said, "I was a student there when I enlisted."
The doctor called to a couple of the Red Cross men. "Here's a chap from Harvard University in Cambridge, over in the United States." The two Red Cross men came and told me they were students at Cambridge. They talked to me for quite a little while. Before they left me to attend to some more wounded, they made me promise to ask to be sent to Cambridge, England, to hospital. The University had established a very large and thoroughly equipped hospital there. All I had to do, they said, was tell the people that I had been a student at the other Cambridge, and I should be an honored guest. They persisted in calling Harvard, Cambridge, and when they went away said that they were overjoyed to have seen a man from the sister university.
The doctor came back in a few minutes.
"How are you feeling now?" he said.
"I feel pretty well now," I answered, "but it's very close in here with all these wounded men, and the place smells of chloroform. Can't I be moved outside?"
"I'll move you outside if you say so," said the doctor, "but you're taking a chance. Occasionally a stray shell comes over this way. The Turks are trying to locate a battery close to this place. Sometimes a shell bursts prematurely, and drops around here."
On the Peninsula, officers who gave men leave to go on dangerous missions salved their consciences by first warning the men that in doing it "they were taking a chance." The caution had come to mean nothing.
"All right, doctor," I said. "I'll take a chance."
Two stretcher bearers came, and lifted me outside the shelter, where the wind blew, fresh and invigorating. Just as they turned, I heard the old familiar shriek that signaled the coming of a shell. It burst almost overhead. Most of the missiles it contained dropped on the other side of the shelter, but a few tiny pieces flew in my direction. Three of them hit me in the right arm, a fourth landed in my leg.
"Is anybody hit?" yelled a Red Cross man, whose accent proclaimed him as an inhabitant of the country north of the Clyde.