The Ramparts Cemetery (Lille Gate) Ypres
at Night
2IO
THE YPRES TIMES
Through the barrage, Brown was soon at the support line, where complete
peace reigned. The regimental stretcher-bearers inspected his wound, which
they found to be a clean hole with no external bleeding, on which they put
a bandage which at once fell off. Every minute it became more evident that
he had got a bad internal injury, the pain was steadily growing worse, while
his strength was ebbing. He knew where the main dressing station lay, and as
he saw no chance of any attention nearer, he began painfully to make for it. It
was now that he met a reserve stretcher-bearer of his battalion, a good Samaritan
who began to help him on his way, until up came one of those sergeants who
never see the line, who proceeded to inform the stretcher-bearer that he had got
a better job than that for him. That was a long, long trail, slower and slower
every step, with head bent down to his knees, and sweat running from
every pore; but he got there.
The doctor at the dressing station was not over worried about a nice little
hole which did not bleed, and Brown soon found himself in an ambulance
containing four stretcher cases; but he was not one of these, having been termed
a sitting case. By this time he could neither sit nor stand, and endured agonies
at every jolt of the ambulance. Most of that dismal journey was passed on his
hands and knees, with head resting on the arm of a friendly stretcher case.
At the Field Ambulance he met with kindness, and what was more important,
intelligence. It was discovered for the first time that things were serioushe
was placed on his first stretcher, and labelled for urgent operation. The references
of those doctors to the M.O. who had committed him to that agonizing run in
the ambulance were far from complimentary.
Without any undue delay Brown found himself at the C.C.S. at Heilly,
where he waited on his stretcher behind many others in a similar situation. At
last his turn came, the trouble was located, and the friendly chloroform gave
him peace after a day of varied emotions. In the night he awoke to find himself
in a real bed, but it was not until the next day, when the surgeon paid him a
visit, that he discovered that he was wearing a necklace of lint from which hung
a pendant in the form of a shrapnel bullet which had been extracted by a skilful
hand from one of the vital abdominal organs of his body. Brown still has that
bullet.
J. B.
Calm and lovely is the night,
And the graves are lovely too
The moon rides high as if it rode
With deep intent to strew
Its beams upon the water,
Where peace is born anew.
It is well with you, my brothers, it is well
Sleeping in the shadows of this immortal place
That saw your comrades pass, and pass again,
And was the silent witness of their grace,
And all their holy pain.
R. HENDERSON-BLAND,
(Late Gloucestershire Regiment).
