In the course of the morning I had my hands full enough. Our Surgeon had gone to Scotland in a state of health which rendered recovery hopeless, and our senior assistant, naturally of a delicate constitution, and suffering under disease at the time of the action, had the last of his strength exhausted in bringing his wounded down. Waggon after waggon arrived, and before mid-day I found myself in charge of two hundred and twenty wounded, including my own Regiment, prisoners and militia, with no one to assist me but my hospital serjeant, who, luckily for me, was a man of sound sense and great experience, who made a most able second; but with all this the charge was too much for us, and many a poor fellow had to submit to amputation whose limb might have been preserved had there been only time to take reasonable care of it. But under the circumstances of the case it was necessary to convert a troublesome wound into a simple one, or to lose the patient's life from want of time to pay him proper attention. One of the many blunders of this blundering war, was that the Staff of the Army was never where it was wanted. The Medical and Commissariat Staffs, for instance, were congregated at the headquarters at Quebec, where they were in redundancy, with nothing for them to do, while a Staff Surgeon and an Hospital Mate were all that was allowed for the Army of the Right,--men who must have been active beyond all precedent if they could keep the office business, the accounts and returns square, without even attempting to interfere with the practice; and all this at a time too, when there was hardly a regiment in the field that had its full complement of medical officers. There is hardly on the face of the earth a less enviable situation than that of an Army Surgeon after a battle--worn out and fatigued in body and mind, surrounded by suffering, pain and misery, much of which he knows it is not in his power to heal or even to assuage. While the battle lasts these all pass unnoticed, but they come before the medical man afterwards in all their sorrow and horror, stripped of all the excitement of the "heady fight."