n men, one of whom wrote in his diary that he loved to
see the bombardment of Tanga, "for Zahn was there, the ----, and I hope
he'll meet a 12-inch shell." Jealous of his officer's prerogative, and
disinclined to be nursed in the same ward with our soldiers and his own,
he gave a lot of trouble, demanding inordinately, victimising our
orderly, unashamedly selfish. But he was sheltered from my wrath by the
grave gunshot wound of his thigh. Cowardly under suffering, he was in
striking contrast to Becker, who stood graver pain with hardly a flinch.
After a great struggle he was eventually moved to Korogwe to the
stationary hospital. There it became necessary to amputate his leg, and
Zahn surrendered what little courage he had left. "No leg to-night, no
Zahn to-morrow," he said to his nurse. And he was right, for at eleven
that night he had no leg, and at two the next morning there was no Zahn
upon this earth.

And there was Sergeant Eve of the South African Infantry, who got a
D.C.M., a Londoner, and of unquenchable good humour. Vastly pleased with
the daily bottle of stout we got for him with such difficulty, from
supplies, he faced the awful daily dressing of his shattered leg without
flinching, pretending to great comfort and an excellent position of his
splint, which his crooked leg and my practised eye belied.

And there was Smith, yet a boy, but who always felt "champion" and
"quite comfortable," though his days were few in the land and his pain
must have been very severe. Yet in his case he had days of that merciful
euthanasia, the wonderful ease from pain that sometimes lasts for days
before the end. In great contrast with these was an individual with a
wound through the fleshy part of the thigh, by far the least seriously
wounded of all in the ward, who never failed with his unending requests
to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public
dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I
had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that
allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown away with
discarded dressings.

But, of all, the perfect prince was De La Motte, a subaltern in the 29th
Punjabis, ever the leader of the dangerous patrols along the native bush
paths that give themselves so readily to ambush. Shot through the spine
and paralysed below the waist his life was only a question of months.
But if he had little time to live, he had dete