This was no time to stand idly by, wondering how and why he had come to this useless sacrifice. It was enough that he was here and living. I knelt at his side, and though my surgery was rough, it stopped the flow in which his life was draining away; his parched lips drank the proffered water, and when his head was on my knees he turned his face from the light and clasped his hands almost with contentment. He seemed to know that a friend was with him. The friend who had bound his wound and given him drink would find him a better bed than these rough stones and a kinder shelter than this bit of shadow, swept by the dust of endless pack-trains.
In such a place a friend could avail little. We carried him back from the turmoil of the road into the trampled wheat and there made him a rude tent of my blanket and a pillow of my saddle. Then I looked about me for help. The pack-trains clattered along the road and through them wounded men were threading their way, painfully hobbling to the field-hospital, miles away. Of ambulances there were none. I knew that when night came they would stagger back from the fighting front with their loads of wounded, and that so few were they in numbers the chance of finding a place in them was of the smallest. The Turk does not trouble much with the wounded. When a man is hit and he can hobble miles to the hospital, then Allah be praised! If not, he lies where he falls till night comes and his comrades find him and tie him like a bag of grain on a pony's back and send him on a journey that would be death to any Christian. If a surgeon finds him he is lucky. Remembering this, I looked back over the road by which I had come, measuring the miles we must cross before we reached help, and then at the Professor lying at my feet hardly breathing. I knew that we stayed where we were. Then I looked to the front. There was help there. There were surgeons working in that wide-spread wreath of smoke. I pointed over the plain and called to Asaf to hurry and bring me a surgeon. He demurred, for he was always chary about entering the zone of fire. I promised him a hundred pounds, a farm, a horse, a flock of sheep, if only he would go and bring me a surgeon. Malcolm Bey was mad, he said; no surgeon would come at such a time, miles for a single wounded man. I knew that he was right, but I could not sit idly watching my friend's life ebb away. I doubled the prize, and with a shrug of the shoulders Asaf mounted and galloped off.