There were very few wounds now to attend to in the hospital dug-out.
Mostly we got men with sandfly-fever and dysentery; men with scabies
and lice; men utterly and unspeakably exhausted, with hollow, black-
rimmed eyes, cracked lips and foot-sores; men who limped across the
sandy bed, dragging their rifles and equipment in their hands; men who
were desperately hungry, whose eyes held the glint of sniper-madness;
men whose bodies were wasting away, the skin taut and dry like a drum,
with every rib showing like the beams of a wreck, or the rafters of an
old roof.

Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We
do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed
Lancers." We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle,
and wreckage is always a sad sight--human wreckage most of all.

But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing
colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand.

And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons
of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some
future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man.




CHAPTER XXII


DUG-OUT YARNS