This Bloody Place by A.H. Mure

Author:A.H. Mure [Mure, A.H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, World War I
ISBN: 9781473857926
Google: oY8SswEACAAJ
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2016-02-20T00:38:21+00:00

Chapter 13

The Battle of Fir-Tree Wood – Second Phase

The next morning gave us a little breathing-space; and to me it gave an opportunity of getting ‘the hang’ of the position, and of forming an idea of our casualties. One of our best subalterns had been killed. Three subalterns and a captain were wounded.

At this period it was very difficult to get the wounded away. The stretcher-bearers had already been pretty well knocked about, and it meant two effective soldiers’ lives risked, to each wounded man, in the endeavour to get them taken back. This entailed keeping the wounded till nightfall, when a few men could be spared. But this too was dangerous, for the peninsula was a most peculiar place to walk about in at night – you never knew the minute you might go head over heels into a nullah. The place abounded in nullahs, cracks, and fissures.

All art is cruel, and, though it rewards greatly, it demands and exacts great sacrifice. War is the cruellest art of all. To wage it mercifully and tenderly is to wage it ineffectually. And usually to make the attempt is futile and fatuous. To say that in these days we do too little for our wounded is to be absurd. We do our utmost for them, sometimes even to the detriment of the very cause for which they have given themselves. It might even be argued that we do too much. I am not contending that we should do less, and, when any war point is to be gained by it, sacrifice anew the sick and the maimed, who have already sacrificed themselves. But such a policy can be defended with some show of logic, and though one’s gorge rises (mine does) at the suggestion, one’s reason cannot so readily reject it.

It was sometimes a difficult problem to solve in Gallipoli. The stretcher-bearers worked heroically, but they couldn’t do impossibilities. Stretcher-bearers are not a little looked down upon by a certain type of loose thinker and ready talker; I have heard and seen them sniffed at rather disdainfully. But not by soldiers; ye gods, no! We know them. We have seen them at work. But some shallow-pated civilians are apt to class them as an inferior sort of soldier. Well, for my part, I think infinitely more highly of the non-combatant who takes his life in his hand and goes to risk it at the edge of the cauldron than I do of the non-combatant who stays at home snug, and talks much. It is easier to talk in Pall Mall than it is to carry wounded men through fire, under a hot sun, or, in the dark, across dangerous, unknown hostile territory. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’ is eloquently true of life at the front, and the service of the stretcher-bearer is as fine and as brave as anything men ever do. It requires a great amount of coolness and bravery to be a useful stretcher-bearer. And I never saw one funk or fail.

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