The bandages were unwound.  The man’s hair was matted and caked with gore.  There were three deep gashes in the skull.  The head was washed and shaved and then painted with picric acid.  The brilliant electric light, the clean white garments of the fresh teams, the bare head painted bright yellow and the three thin streaks of red blood trickling down made a strange picture.  The largest wound was just above one ear.  A local anaesthetic was injected and the skin round the injury pushed back.  With a pair of curved pincers the surgeon broke away bits of bone from the edge of the hole.  Then he pushed his little finger deeply into it and fetched out a large bone fragment and a quantity of soft matter, coloured a pale red, which he allowed to flop down on to the floor.  The man was motionless except that he violently wagged his left big toe.  And all the time he made a continuous cooing, purring noise, like that of a brooding hen.

The surgeon working at the next table, Captain Wycherley, received a “case” with a shattered right arm and a right thigh.  He called his colleague, Captain Calthrop, over, and the two operated together, the one amputating the arm and the other the leg.

Meanwhile the head case was replaced by a boy who came walking into the theatre and mounted the table unassisted.  His right eye was bandaged.  As he became unconscious under gas the bandage was removed.  With a few dexterous strokes of his scalpel Captain Dowden removed all that was left of the eyeball, a dark, amorphous mess.  The wound was cleaned, dressed and bandaged.  The boy regained consciousness.  For a moment he looked vacantly round.  Then he slowly raised his hand to the bandage, and, turning down the corners of his mouth suddenly broke into bitter weeping.  He was gently helped down from the table and led out of the theatre, crying:  “They’ve done for me eye, oh, oh, oh, they’ve done for me eye!”

“Poor kid,” murmured the Captain sympathetically, and began to operate on the next man, who had a wound in his shoulder about as large as a hand.  In the middle of the raw flesh a short length of undamaged bone was visible.  Nothing serious, and only a flesh wound.  The man inhaled the chloroform and ether fumes without choking or struggling.  His wound was excised, “spirit bipped,” dressed and bandaged.  Then he was whisked off the table and carried away to a ward.

In the doorway appeared a man with his arm in a sling.  He was dazzled by the electric light and put his hand over his eyes.  Captain Wycherley called out to him:  “Come along, my lad, and hop on to this table.”  He walked up to the table with uncertain steps.  An orderly helped him on to it.  He lay back and turned his head to one side and looked towards the next table on which Captain Calthrop was amputating an arm.  It came off in the hands of an orderly who dropped it into the bucket.  The newcomer followed it with horror-stricken eyes.  He continued to gaze, as though fascinated, at the half-closed hand that projected above the edge of the bucket.  Then he trembled violently.