Among these wounded men Sinclair and Gorman worked almost day and night. When a battle was in progress, one or other went out with the ambulance corps, gave the wounded first aid on the field, and forwarded them to the hospital for fuller treatment there. Under leaden skies and the incessant downpour of rain, with insufficient medicines and equipment, and subsisting on poor native food, they worked on week after week, month after month.
Perhaps what was hardest to bear was the fact that during all those months not a word reached them from the outside world. The blockade had effectually excluded all mails. Gorman heard nothing from his family in Amoy. Sinclair had never a line from Hong-Kong.
"Bedad," said Gorman one day, "this is a time when a man would be glad to be afther seein' the shape of a letter, even if it were only from his mother-in-law."
"Let me have a look at your tongue, and a feel of your pulse, Gorman!" exclaimed Sinclair, reaching for the sergeant's wrist. "I knew that you were in a bad way. But I had no idea that you were so far gone as that."
"Och, docther, but wudn't I show you the iligances of an Irish jig, if the ould lady wud only write to me that she was dead an' p'acefully departed. Then I cud go home to me wife an' childer."
It was a time when men were tested. Daily, hourly, Sinclair thought of the girl he loved, spending the winter in Hong-Kong, subject to the attentions and solicitations of the now titled Carteret, and the pressure brought to bear by her mother. His hands would clench and his jaws set hard. But he was sure that Jessie MacAllister would do her part. Over and over again her farewell words kept running through his mind, "I'll be thinking of you, Donald, and you'll be thinking of me."
The longest and dreariest months will always come to an end. When February had passed, the skies began to clear sometimes. The first week of March had some beautiful days.
With this came renewed activity on the part of the French. In a series of actions lasting five days, March 3d to 7th, they succeeded in capturing some of the strongest Chinese positions on the mountain-tops near Loan-Loan.
Sinclair had chosen for his field hospital and ambulance station a situation at the back of the post most strongly fortified by the Chinese. It was a mountain with a steep, almost perpendicular ascent, covered with grass and ferns and bamboos, on the side of the French attack. In this cover the Chinese irregulars were hidden. The crest of the hill was crowned by an interwoven fence of sharpened bamboos, a veritable chevaux-de-frise. Three other lines of entrenchments extended along the face of the hill, and had to be crossed by the assailants before the main position of the Chinese could be reached.
Behind the bamboo stockade, on the slope which led down towards the valley in which the river and the town lay, was a strong force of regular troops. Their right was commanded by the American, Silas Z. Leatherbottom; their left by a young Chinese officer, trained abroad. Gorman was with the right; Sinclair with the left.