I requisitioned some beds for my hospital; and when I had got all the wounded men dressed and fed, I thought that my day's work was finished. Just as I was going out for a short rest, however, an orderly came and told me that a number of wounded men were lying in a Turkish mosque without any help at all, and asked me to go to them. I found a most beautiful little mosque nestling down in a grove of trees on a slope of ground to the west side of the Tutchenitza, and, mounting the half-dozen steps which formed the approach to the main entrance, I looked inside. It was indeed a hideous sight. The square floor of the mosque was covered with dead and wounded men, who had been placed there on the day before, and apparently forgotten. There were about eighty of them altogether, and the first thing that we had to do was to separate the living from the dead, which was not an easy task, as the dead were lying across the living and the living across the dead. We took out twenty-seven dead men first, and found that in some cases a man with faint signs of life in him had been lying all night, half suffocated by his own blood and by the inert mass of a dead comrade lying across him. The walls, which were whitewashed, were plentifully bespattered with blood, and soon I was a shocking spectacle myself. I put on a soldier to go round with a bucket and pannikin to assuage the fiery thirst of the poor wretches, and then I set to work extracting bullets and sewing up wounds and washing them as fast as I could, with a soldier to help in the dressing. I undertook no big operations simply because I had not time. It was a race for life with many of the men; and while there were cases there which would have required at least an hour to deal with properly, the most that I could spare was ten minutes. By July 22 all the wounded that could travel had been sent to Sofia, and we had about two hundred of the graver cases left, most of them being cases requiring serious operations. We selected a convenient building on the banks of the Tutchenitza, right under the shadow of a mosque, and there we set up operating tables under the trees in the open air. It was strange every day to see a flock of white doves circling round the minaret of the mosque, and every evening at sunset to watch the old Mussulman priest as he climbed the tower and solemnly invited the faithful to prayer. CHAPTER VI. THE INTERVAL BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND BATTLES.