We stewed 30 kilos of meat, with vegetables, this morning, and served it at 12.15. As we cut up their meat for the handless and armless, they were as unanimous in their appreciation of the food as we had been in our admiration of the excellent ration beef, of which each man is entitled to ten ounces. We can only attribute the men's grousing to the fact that it may sometimes be insufficiently cooked. Better meat and vegetables were surely never served before a king.
September 30th. As far as possible only the slight cases are sent to us, so that the work amongst the fit may go on as usual.
Amongst the lying-down cases is a man with a bullet through the pelvis, a gaunt Irishman of a strange hue, who, whilst wounded, had been gassed by one of our own explosive shells.
"Look at them raindrops," said he. "That's 'ow the bullets fell, thick as that."
"The wonder ain't the number of casualties, it's that anyone could live through it," rejoined another.
"But we were through the fifth line o' their trenches and fightin' in the open when I come down," adds a third, his eyes gleaming with the light of victory that betokens that it was all worth while.
The achievement of our men seems all the more wonderful when one hears how they were not only outnumbered and outflanked, but, in many parts of the line, lacking in ammunition, which they maintain had to be held in reserve for the main attack.
As the dressings were being done by the solitary nurse and doctor in charge, as one by one the wounds were attended to, and a silence pregnant with unuttered groans reigned, one felt vividly that none but Michelangelo himself could depict that scene—those fine, muscular forms looming in the dim morning light.