I stood up. For an instant the ghastly scene turned round and round.... I thought that I should faint with horror. I put my hand--dripping with blood--to my forehead.... I daubed my face with gore. In order not to fall I had to lean up against the wheel of the forge. A hospital orderly had succeeded in extricating a couple of untouched stretchers from the ambulance, which had also been shattered by the shell. On one side of the road the Medical Officer, still much upset, himself slightly wounded by the explosion, was occupied with some first-aid dressing. Three of us hoisted on to one of the stretchers a big, fair-haired gunner with a Gaulois moustache, whose foot, almost completely severed from the leg, dangled in the air, and who was yelling with pain. We remembered that there was a dressing-station at the foot of the hill on the fringe of the woods. We started off, bending our knees in order to jolt the stretcher as little as possible, but we continually had to step over the scattered limbs of horses and pick our way between corpses so disfigured as to be unrecognizable. A wounded man clasped my leg as we passed, lifting up a deathly face which the blood, running from his ear, had surrounded with a gory collar. His eyes implored us to stop, and in a low voice of profound supplication he murmured: "For God's sake don't leave me here!" But we could not carry two men at a time. I bent down a little: "The others will be along in a minute or two with the other stretcher. They'll take you. Come, now, let go of my foot!..." We left the shambles and began to breathe again.... The closely meshed cloth of the stretcher retained the blood of the wounded man, whose foot swam in a red pool. He was suffering horribly and twisted his arms together, groaning: "Oh, my foot!... You're shaking me.... Oh, how you're shaking me!" And then: "For God's sake walk slowly!" In spite of all our efforts we could not avoid the shaking which caused him so much pain, and he continued to murmur, his voice getting fainter and fainter: "Walk, walk ... slowly!..." His lips silently repeated "walk" until a fresh jolt made him cry out. In front of the field-hospital some medical officers had improvised an operating-table in a shady part of the road. The wounded were laid out in rows on the edge of the ditch. A fat doctor with four stripes on his arm ran hither and thither, shouting. Carried on stretchers or limping on foot, either alone or with the aid of their comrades, the wounded arrived. One man's chin was no more than a bloody jelly; one of his eyes was shut and the other wide open.