Some of the wounded men were in very strange attitudes. One man was kneeling as if in prayer; another was on his hands and knees; another was lying in his own brains. All three had been stripped by the Bashi-Bazouks. The Russian line of retreat could be easily distinguished, for it was marked out by a track of dead bodies laid as plainly as the track of a paper-chase. Here and there I could see where groups of them had tried to make a little stand, and had been shot down thirty or forty or fifty at a time. I saw one dead man in a most extraordinary position. He was stuck in the fork of a tree about fifteen feet from the ground, having evidently climbed it for safety, and then been shot by a stray bullet. Returning from my visit to the dead, I devoted myself again to the wounded in the hospitals, and performed a number of amputations together with Osman Effendi, who worked splendidly with me. In the intervals of work next day I rode out again to the battle-field, which was beginning to smell terribly, so that we had to send out more burial parties to bury them in large trenches containing eighty or a hundred bodies each. So terrible had been the slaughter that some Russian regiments had literally ceased to exist. Within a very few days after the battle we had sent away the greater number of the wounded, and only the cases for operation remained. All of these were removed to the main hospital, and Osman Effendi and myself resumed our work upon this new supply of patients. All our operations were done out of doors in the same place under the willow tree near the bank of the Tutchenitza. A great number of cases ended fatally which in a civil hospital would probably have resulted differently; but we did not attempt any intricate operations, and we were also hampered by the fact that the patients frequently preferred to die rather than undergo the amputation of a limb. If a man had a bullet in his knee, for instance, such a thing as excising the knee or laying it open was never thought of, and we simply took the leg off. This is a legitimate course for a surgeon to adopt in time of war, because the skilled attention necessary to the after treatment of a delicate operation was not available, and it was often better surgery to take a man's leg off and preserve his life than to perform an intricate operation in order to save the leg with the probability of the patient succumbing for want of careful nursing afterwards. As in the case of the wounded in the first battle, there were a large number of men whose fingers we had to amputate.