bleeding, and both would bleed to death within half an hour or so. I
reckoned it was almost hopeless with the tourniquet-man and I left him
passing painlessly from life to death. But the ankle-man's wound was
still bleeding when I turned again to him. It trickled through my
plugging. It's a difficult thing to stop the bleeding from such a
place. Seeing the plug was useless I tried another way. I rolled up
one of his puttees, put it under his knee, braced his knee up and tied
it in position with the other puttee. This brought pressure on the
artery itself and stopped the loss of blood from his ankle. I could
hear the Turkish machine-gun much closer now. It sputtered out a
leaden rain with a hard metallic clatter.

"Thanks, mate," said the man; " 'ow's the other bloke?"

"He's all right," I answered, and I could see him lying a little way
up the hill, calm and still and stiffening.

I found two regimental stretcher-bearers coming down with the rest in
this little retreat, and I got them to take my ankle-man on to their
dressing station about two miles further back.

It's no fun attending to wounded when the troops are retiring.

Next day they regained the lost position, and I trudged past the poor
dead body of the man who had bled to death. The tourniquets were still
gripping his lifeless limbs and the blood on the handkerchiefs had
dried a rich red-brown.