er to recover of their contusion in
the hospital at Dar-es-Salaam.

THE SURGERY OF THIS WAR

"Please give us a drop of Johnnie Walker before you do my dressing,"
said my Irish sergeant, who had lost his leg in the fight at Kangata.
Lest you might think that by "Johnnie Walker" he asked for his favourite
brand of whiskey, I may tell you that we had no stimulant of that kind
with us. It was chloroform he wanted to dull the pain that dressing his
severed nerves entailed. Always full of cheer and blarney, he kept our
ward alive, only when the time for daily dressing came round did his
countenance fall. Then anxious eyes begged for ease from pain. But this
once over, he laid his tired dirty face upon the embroidered pillow and
jested of all the things the careful German housewife would say could
she but see her embroidered sheets and the blue silk cushion from her
drawing-room that kept his amputated leg from jars. We had no water to
wash the men, barely enough for cooking and for surgical dressings, but
there were silk bedspreads and eiderdown quilts and all the treasures of
German sitting-rooms. And the fact that they were taken from the Germans
was balm to these wounded men.

There was Murray, a regimental sergeant-major, his leg badly broken by
the lead slug from a German Askari's rifle, ever the fore-most at the
padre's services, chanting the responses and leading all the hymns. And
Wehmeyer, the young Boer, who had accidentally blown a great hole
through his leg above the ankle joint. And Green, the Rhodesian sergeant
who had been brought in, almost _in extremis_, with blackwater. Nor was
his condition improved by the experience of having been blown up in the
ambulance by a land mine, hidden in the thick dust of the road. Thrown
into the air by the force of the explosion, the car had turned over on
him and the driver, who was killed. And there was Becker the blue-eyed
German prisoner with a bullet through his femoral artery and his hip.
Blanched from loss of blood before I could tie the vessel and stanch the
bleeding, his leg suspended in our improvised splints, and on his way to
make a splendid recovery. And Taube, another German prisoner, shot
through the abdomen, and recovering after his operation. Gentle and
conciliatory, with eyes of a frightened rabbit, he was the son of the
great Taube, the physiologist of Dresden.

Cheek by jowl, in the best bed, was Zahn, the hated Ober-Leutenant,
loathed by his ow