nt threw
himself down on the ground and made of his body a _human sledge_. Some
others joined us, and we put the wounded man on his back and dragged
them thus across two hundred yards of No Man's Land, through the broken
barbed wire and shell-torn ground, where every few inches there was a
piece of jagged shell, and in and out of the shell-holes. So anxious
were we to get to safety that we did not notice the condition of the
man underneath until we got into our trenches; then it was hard to see
which was the worst wounded of the two. The sergeant had his hands,
face, and body torn to ribbons, and we had never guessed it, for never
once did he ask us to "go slow" or "wait a bit." Such is the stuff
that men are made of.

It sounds incredible, but we got a wounded man, still alive, eight days
after the attack. It was reported to me that some one was heard
calling from No Man's Land for a stretcher-bearer, but I suspected a
German trap, for I did not think it possible that any man could be out
there alive when it was more than a week after the battle and there had
been no men missing since. However, we had to make sure, and I took a
man out with me named Private Mahoney; also a ball of string. We still
heard the call, and as it came from nearer the German trenches than
ours we knew they must hear as well. When we got near the shell-hole
from which the sound came I told Mahoney to wait, while I crawled round
to approach it from the German side. I took the end of the ball of
string in my hand, so as to be able to signal back, and from a
shell-hole just a few yards away I asked the man who he was and to tell
me the names of some of his officers. As he seemed to know the names
of all the officers I crawled into the hole alongside him, though I was
still suspicious, and signalled back to my companion to go and get a
stretcher.

As soon as I had a good look at the poor fellow I knew he was one of
ours. His hands and face were as black as a negro's, and all of him
from the waist down was beneath the mud. He had not strength to move
his hands, but his "_voice was a good deal too strong_," for he started
to talk to me in a shout: "It's so good, matey, to see a real live man
again. I've been talking to dead men for days. There was two men came
up to speak to me who carried their heads under their arms!"

I whispered to him to _shut up_, but he would only be quiet for a
second or two, and soon the Germans knew that we