Captain Wycherley observed what was happening and said: 

“Come on, don’t worry about the next man.  Let’s have a look at your wound.”

“Yer not goin’ ter take orf me arm, are yer, sir?”

“No, of course not, don’t be so silly!”

“Yer won’t ’urt me, sir, will yer?”

“No, no.  Pull yourself together now.  Be a man!  You won’t feel anything at all.”

The orderly untied the sling and began to unwind the bandage, but the man drew his arm away and cried: 

“Oo, oo, oo,—­very painful, sir, very painful!”

The orderly, pleased at being mistaken for an officer, said in a soothing, patronizing voice: 

“We’ll just have this bit o’ bandage orf an’ then we’ll give yer some gas and send yer orf to sleep.  You won’t feel nothin’ and yer a sure Blighty.  I wouldn’ be surprised if yer got acrorss termorrer.”

He went on unwinding the bandage, but the man began to shout and struggle again.

Thereupon the surgeon intervened: 

“For God’s sake be quiet.  Pull yourself together and don’t make such a fuss.”

“I can’t ’elp it, sir—­I couldn’t never stick no pain, sir, no, sir, never, sir—­it’s very painful, sir, very painful.  I’ll try ’ard, I’ll do me best—­but it is painful, sir.”

However, as soon as the bandage was pulled a little he yelled and writhed.  The surgeon at last lost patience and said:  “Hold him down.”

Two orderlies and two bearers seized his hands and feet while the bandage was quickly removed.  He shrieked and struggled violently, but he was firmly held.

He had a small, deep wound in the fleshy part of the forearm.  He received gas and soon lost consciousness.  The surgeon pushed a probe into the hole.  There was a metallic click, whereupon he inserted his forceps and pulled out a jagged piece of steel, the fragment of a German shell.  When the wound had been excised and dressed, the man was carried away and replaced by another whose right leg was thickly wrapped up.  The wrapping was removed and revealed a shattered knee and two toes dangling from the foot.  Captain Wycherley snipped them off with a pair of scissors.  The man winced and they dropped on to the floor.  The anaesthetist administered gas.  It was some time, however, before the patient lost consciousness, for the balloon that adjoined the mouthpiece leaked badly and once the rubber-tubing was blown off the nozzle of the cylinder.

Captain Dowden was busy with a foot, or all that was left of a foot, a number of crimson shreds hanging from an ankle over a projecting piece of bone.  Captain Calthrop was attending to a “belly case”—­he had cut a longitudinal slit in his patient’s abdomen and both his hands were groping inside it, buried up to the wrists, while the stomach-wall heaved up and down with the breathing of the unconscious man.