In addition to the grave cases which involved the removal of an arm or leg, we had a large number of minor injuries to attend to, especially wounds in the hand, which were remarkably frequent. When the troops were in the act of firing, their fingers and hands were naturally exposed; and though later on, when the firing was mainly done from behind entrenchments, finger wounds became far more frequent, still we had a good many of them even after the first battle. A splendid lesson in stoical fortitude was afforded by those fellows, who tendered their maimed hands for operation without the slightest flinching. The stump of a willow tree which had been cut down stood near the bank of the stream, and here I was accustomed to take my seat, after providing myself with a basin of water from the stream and a sharp knife. I put a little carbolic in the water, and with these simple preparations I was ready for my patients, who sat cross-legged in a row close by me. There was no administration of chloroform by a skilled anæsthetist, no careful dressing of the injury by a white-aproned nurse, none of the usual accessories of the ordinary hospital; for my operating theatre had a carpet of greensward starred with wild flowers, and its ceiling was the deep blue sky of midsummer. Instead of the rows of students who usually grace these scientific ceremonies, scores of the snow-white doves that are considered sacred throughout Turkey paused now and then in their cooings, as they fluttered round the minarets of the ancient mosque above the willow grove and looked down upon the strange scene below them. The wounded soldiers took their turns each in his proper order; and as I sat on the willow stump a man with a thumb or finger, as the case might be, mangled into a shocking pulp of festering flesh, would hold up his injured hand to me as he sat on the grass at my feet, and would look on without flinching while I cut away the rotting flesh, trimmed up the place, and washed and dressed the bleeding stump that still remained. I did over a dozen of these cases in one morning; and later in the campaign, when the fighting in the redoubts began, I have amputated as many as twenty-seven fingers in succession.