a man thinks of a meal and a drink, that he counts up his hurts.
In the fight he has perhaps thrown away his haversack to give himself more
freedom of movement, or a chance bullet has pierced his water-bottle; and
there he is, miles from anywhere, with neither rations to eat nor water
wherewith to slake the thirst that seems to be gnawing his throat away. Nor
has he the chance of obtaining more, except from a comrade.

There were small parties of men concerned in the remoter fighting who
advanced too far, and when night fell, lost touch with the main body. For
forty-eight hours some of them were lost in the desert; water and rations
were soon all gone, and they suffered intolerably with the heat. Hunger
they could endure, but they were driven to dreadful and unnameable
expedients to quench the thirst that consumed them.

When at last they did find their comrades, their tongues and lips were so
blackened and swollen that the first drinks had to be given through a
straw.

Imagine the plight of the wounded, lying on the slopes of Wellington Ridge
and elsewhere, racked with pain, and tortured almost to madness by flies
and thirst, exposed for hours to the merciless rays of the sun, until the
stretcher-bearers, working though they were like men inspired, had the
opportunity to carry them away to the rear.

And then, what? Here were no swift, easy-running cars, no comfortable
hospital-trains to whirl them down to a Base where there were baths, clean
linen, and kindly sisters to make them forget what had passed. Instead, two
or three bell-tents wherein doctors and orderlies, worked almost to a
standstill and rocking on their legs with fatigue, strove to dress the
wounds of the maimed and shattered men.

Nor was this the worst. After the wounds had been cleansed and bound up as
well as might be, came the journey down to Kantara. The lucky few were
carried in sand-carts, but the large majority went on camel-back, lying in
a cacolet. A cacolet is a kind of stretcher-bed with a rail round it, and a
hood over the top to protect the occupant from the sun. Each camel carried
two cacolets, one clamped to each side of a specially constructed saddle.
To a wounded man the motion was the very refinement of torture, especially
if the other cacolet were occupied by a heavier man. At one moment the
cacolet swung high in the air, and the sufferer was banged against the
lower rail; the next, it was at the other extreme, and he was almost t