Sinclair glanced at MacKay. The latter understood:
"Better not have an amputation first thing. They are ignorant and suspicious."
"I thought so. Anyway, I do not want to take time to amputate now. We'll dress it and amputate later."
A shrapnel shell had exploded close to another's side. The hip, part of the pelvis, and much of the flesh had been shredded away, exposing the working of the organs of the abdomen. It was not good to see. From that ghastly rent blood-poisoning had already set in. There was nothing to be done. They made him as easy as possible on the hard boards of his cot, administered an opiate, and left him to sleep till the last sleep should fall upon him.
One had been struck just above the ear, and a chip of his skull three inches in diameter shot away, leaving his brain uncovered.
"He will die. We'll make him comfortable in the meantime."
A fragment had caught another on the cheek, and his lower jaw was gone.
"Better if he would die, too. It would be a mercy to let him out easy. But, no; if God gives him a chance, so must I. We'll patch him up."
More to himself than to any one else, he was speaking in a low tone. All the while the doctor's hands were busy dressing, soothing, trimming, mending, healing those poor, shattered bodies of ignorant Asiatic peasants, the weak atoms of humanity which a great European nation had sent her mighty engines of death to destroy--the pitiful trophies of glorious war. And not one of those brown or yellow men had the faintest glimmer of an idea what the war was about, or why his poor body had been maltreated so. The foreign devils had come to take his land and he had been set to defend it. That was all he knew.
Stranger still was what these other foreign devils were doing. They were trying to heal him. One set of foreign devils by their magic had knocked his fortifications to pieces, mangled his body, and brought him to the verge of death. And now another set of foreign devils, by some other magic, were patching his broken body together again and bringing it back to life. He could not understand.
But some way or another those last foreigners grew into his confidence. There was something in the words of that barbarian with the long black beard, who spoke their language more perfectly than they did themselves, which quieted him and gave him hope. There was something about the great, red-haired giant,[#] who did not seem to understand their language at all and yet seemed to understand at once what his sufferings were and how to heal them, which inspired him with confidence. It might be magic he was using, but it must be good magic. Before him men were writhing restlessly on their wooden beds, sometimes moaning, occasionally uttering an agonized "ai-yah," ever and anon asking plaintively for water or tea. Behind him they lay back peacefully and, with few exceptions, went to sleep.