Although I could speak Turkish sufficiently to make myself understood for ordinary purposes, I found myself in difficulties when my patients began to talk to me about their private affairs, or to go into long accounts of their adventures on the battle-field. Sometimes, however, I was able to gather a few startling illustrations of the ferocity with which the engagement had been fought. One of my patients was the colonel of a Kurdish regiment, a magnificent specimen of a man, who had been shot in the thigh by a rifle-bullet. The ball had entered the left thigh on the outside, passed clean through it, and also through the right thigh, making four distinct wounds, which had occasioned a great deal of hæmorrhage with inflammatory conditions and high temperature. I refrain from giving this patient's name as he may be still alive, and he probably would not desire to remember the incident which he related to me. He told me that he received his wound in the height of the action, and became for a while unconscious. When he came to himself, he commenced to crawl on his hands and knees towards the Turkish lines, and on his way he came to a Russian officer lying wounded on the ground. I give the story now in his own words. "I saw him lying there before me," whispered my patient to me as I dressed his wounds, "and the impulse to kill him came into my mind. I suppose he read my purpose in my face, for he pointed to his wound, and then he held up his hands to me as if to ask for quarter. As I crawled over on my hands and knees, I knelt over him and pointed to my own wounds in reply. Then I drew my revolver and shot him through the head. My servant, who had come to look for me, was close behind me. He was a Kurd, and he took his long Kurdish knife and cut off the Russian's head before he was dead. The air made a gurgling, bubbling sound as the knife went through the windpipe. The Russian officer had a long fair beard. He was a fine man, and I shall never forget his face. You are horrified. Well, it was war. I was not a man then, I was a wild beast. I killed him as he lay there because he was in my power. If I had been in the same position, he would have killed me. It was destiny." Each of the members of the medical staff had a similar hospital to attend to, and all were managed on much the same lines. As a rule I finished my work in the forenoon, and had the rest of the day more or less to myself, except when it was my turn to attend at the main hospital, where once a week I had to be in attendance all night on emergency duty.