my prospects of winning through became duller day by day.  I suffered absolute agonies in forcing my way along, and eventually I could only push myself by means of a ski-stick, for I could not step out properly.  I somehow waddled on ski until one day I fainted when striving to start a march.  Crean and Lashly picked me up, and Crean thought I was dead.  His hot tears fell on my face, and as I came to I gave a weak kind of laugh.

They rigged the camp up once more and put me in my bag, and then those two gallant fellows held a short council of war.  I endeavoured to get them to leave me when they came in with their suggestions, but it was useless to argue with them, and I now felt that I had shot my bolt.  I vainly tried to persuade them to leave me in my sleeping-bag with what food they could spare, but they put me on the sledge, bag and all, and strapped me as comfortably as they could with their own sleeping-bags spread under me to make for greater ease.

How weary their marches must have been—­ten miles of foot slogging each day.  I could see them from the sledge by raising my head—­how slowly their legs seemed to move—­wearily but nobly they fought on until one day a blizzard came and completely spoilt the surface.  The two men had been marching nearly 1500 miles, their strength was spent, and great though their hearts were, they had now to give up.  In vain they tried to move the sledge with my wasted weight upon it—­it was hopeless.

Very seriously and sadly they re-erected our tent and put me once again inside.  I thought I was being put into my grave.  Outside I heard them talking, low notes of sadness, but with a certain thread of determination running through what they said.  They were discussing which should go and which should stay.  Crean had done, if anything, the lighter share of the work, as already explained, and he therefore set out to march thirty-five miles with no food but a few biscuits and a little stick of chocolate.

He hoped to find relief at Hut Point.  Failing this, he would go on if possible to Cape Evans.

Crean came in to say good-bye to me.  I thanked him for what he was doing in a weak, broken sort of way, and Lashly held open the little round tent door to let me see the last of him.  He strode out nobly and finely—­I wondered if I should ever see him, again.  Then Lashly came in to me, shut the tent door, and made me a little porridge out of some oatmeal we got from the last depot we had passed.

After I had eaten it he made me comfortable by laying me on Crean’s sleeping-bag, which made my own seem softer, for I was very, very sore after being dragged a hundred miles on a jolting, jumping sledge.  Then I slept and awoke to find Lashly’s kind face looking down at me.  There were very few wounded men in the Great War nursed as I was by him.

A couple of days passed, and every now and then Lashly would open up the tent door, go out and search the horizon for some possible sign of relief.  The end had nearly come, and I was past caring; we had no food, except a few paraffin saturated biscuits, and Lashly in his weakened state without food could never have marched in.  He took it all very quietly—­a noble, steel true man—­but relief did come at the end of that day when everything looked its blackest.