The nights of the 22nd and 23rd were very bad. Early on the morning of the 24th, when the doctor came to see how I was, I said: ‘You must send me away from here. The heat will kill me.’ It was beating through the canvas on my head. He said: ‘Stick it out. It’s your best chance to lie here and not to be moved. You’d not reach the base alive.’ I said: ‘I’d like to risk the move. I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ Half an hour later he came back. ‘Well, you’re having it your way. I’ve just got orders to evacuate every case in the hospital. Apparently the Guards have been in it up at Delville Wood and we’ll have them all coming in to-night.’ I had no fears now about dying. I was content to be wounded and on the way home. I had been given news of the battalion from a brigade-major, wounded in the leg, who was in the next bed to me. He looked at my label and said: ‘I see you’re in the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers. Well, I saw your High Wood show through field-glasses. The way your battalion shook out into artillery formation, company by company-with each section of four or five men in file at fifty yards interval and distance—going down into the hollow and up the slope through the barrage, was the most beautiful bit of parade-ground drill I’ve ever seen. Your company officers must have been superb.’ I happened to know that one company at least had started without a single officer. I asked him whether they had held the wood. He said: ‘They hung on at the near end. I believe what happened was that the Public Schools Battalion came away as soon as it got dark; and so did the Scotsmen. Your chaps were left there alone for some time. They steadied themselves by singing. Later, the chaplain—R.C. of course—Father McCabe, brought the Scotsmen back. They were Glasgow Catholics and would follow a priest where they wouldn’t follow an officer. The middle of the wood was impossible for either the Germans or your fellows to hold. There was a terrific concentration of artillery on it. The trees were splintered to matchwood. Late that night the survivors were relieved by a brigade of the Seventh Division; your First Battalion was in it.’ That evening I was put in the hospital train. They could not lift me from the stretcher to put me on a bunk, for fear of starting hæmorrhage in the lung; so they laid the stretcher on top of it, with the handles resting on the head-rail and foot-rail. I had been on the same stretcher since I was wounded. I remember the journey only as a nightmare.