We were soon busy with the wounded Highlanders and well within an hour we had safely placed some 120 men in our bunks, and some on the floor.  I am afraid the poor soldiers often suffered agony when they were lifted in or rolled from the stretchers on to the bunks.  It was sometimes impossible to avoid hurting a man with, say, a shattered thigh-bone and a broken arm in thus changing his position.  We however did our best and lifted them with the utmost care and gentleness, but they often, poor fellows, groaned and cried out in their cruel pain.

At 6 P.M. we saw the funeral of sixty-three Highlanders—­all buried in one long trench close to the line.  No shots were fired over the vast grave, but tears rolled down many a bronzed cheek and the bagpipes played a wild lament.  Surely there is no music like this for the burial of young and gallant men.  The notes seem to express an almost frenzied access of human sorrow!

Soon after this my old Sudan acquaintance, Frederick Villiers, passed through the train.  He did not recognise me in my uniform and I did not make myself known to him as he was with an officer and I was only an orderly.  I wonder if he remembers that dreadful night, 31st August, 1898, when we lay side by side in the desert at Sururab, soaked to the skin from a tropical downpour, and, to make his misery complete, he was stung in the neck by a large scorpion.

We ran down to Orange River with our first load of wounded men, and just as we were crossing the sappers’ pontoon bridge over the Modder a trolly or small waggon broke loose and rushing down the incline in front met our engine and was broken into matchwood.  Most of our cases on this first run were “severe” or “dangerous”.  Some of the men had no less than three bullet wounds, and several were still living whose heads had been pierced by bullets.  During a former journey, after Belmont, poor ——­ of the Guards lived for several days with a bullet through his brain; he was apparently unconscious or semi-conscious and struggled so desperately to remove the bandages from his head that it took three orderlies to hold him down.  When he died the wounded soldier next him burst into tears.

Amongst some cases peculiarly interesting from a medical point of view was that of a Highlander who had three of his fingers shot off with the result that his arm and side were paralysed; in another case a bullet tore its way through and across the crown of a soldier’s head and caused paralysis of the opposite side of the body.  Another man had, so it was said, been hit on the shoulder; the bullet passed right through his body piercing his lungs and intestines and coming out at the thigh.  Yet, strange to say, the poor fellow was in excellent spirits and complained only of slight pain in the abdomen.