We started off, bending our knees in order to jolt the stretcher as little as possible, but we continually had to step over the scattered limbs of horses and pick our way between corpses so disfigured as to be unrecognizable.
A wounded man clasped my leg as we passed, lifting up a deathly face which the blood, running from his ear, had surrounded with a gory collar. His eyes implored us to stop, and in a low voice of profound supplication he murmured:
"For God's sake don't leave me here!"
But we could not carry two men at a time. I bent down a little:
"The others will be along in a minute or two with the other stretcher. They'll take you. Come, now, let go of my foot!..."
We left the shambles and began to breathe again....
The closely meshed cloth of the stretcher retained the blood of the wounded man, whose foot swam in a red pool. He was suffering horribly and twisted his arms together, groaning:
"Oh, my foot!... You're shaking me.... Oh, how you're shaking me!"
And then: