Two more Fusiliers were being led away along with me. They had both been bayoneted, they told me, after they were captured.
I was taken to a place where there were Turkish doctors. One of them gave me a cup of tea. He could speak English, and he asked me how I was. I told him I was pretty bad. I was given a piece of dry bread, but I could not eat it, because my teeth were closed.
It was here that I met a New Zealander or an Australian, a gunner, who had been in the charge. He had no right to be in it, but you could not keep the Anzacs out of the scraps. He said that he and a pal were passing through the place when they saw what was going on. Each of them got hold of a rifle and bayonet and rushed into the charge. The pal was killed and the other man was taken prisoner.
From the doctors’ place I was taken to a sort of dug-out, which had some kind of grass in it that felt like heather. The two bayoneted chaps had been taken there as well, and I was very glad to have their company.
I was left in the dug-out all night, with the other two Fusiliers alongside of me. In the morning we were put into oxen carts, four wounded men in each. They were rough things without springs, and were slowly dragged over rough tracks—you could not call them roads—so that it was fair torture to us, bumping all the while.
At last we were stopped at a place and changed into another oxen cart, and taken farther on. We stopped again, and were given a drink out of a bucket—they must have thought we were horses. I suppose they must have been giving a mule a drink, and then it struck them that they might give us a turn. But bucket or no bucket it was a fine drink.
After that I went into a field hospital, and for the first time since I had been wounded I had my eyes properly attended to.
A Turkish doctor who could speak a little English said “Eyes!” then a word that sounded like “yolk.” I suppose he meant that my eyes were gone; but I knew that before he did.
After I had been attended to I was put into a field hospital and fed three times a day. First of all we had a ration of bread, which had to last all day, and a drink of tea; about the middle of the day we were given some soup, which the chaps called “bill-posters’ paste.” It was awful stuff, and the chaps who were badly wounded in the body could not do with it, so they used to tipple their lot into my basin and I would get through it, as well as through my own. I could not eat bread or anything else, because my jaws were affected and my face was badly swollen—it is partly swollen still, but I could just manage to suck the “bill-posters’ paste” through my teeth.
It was not until now that I really understood what had happened to me. A bullet had struck me on the left side of the forehead and gone clean through both eyes, just missing the brain, and out at the right side—a wonderful escape from instant death, as our own doctors told me afterwards.