[Page 225]
112
bowled me over, but I felt no immediate pain and got up again and resumed my advance, only to be knocked down again by another bullet which struck me in the left thigh and partially severed the big Sciatic nerve. This time I was unable to get up, and definitely out of the fight. I rolled and dragged myself back to our trench, and then rolled down the steep slope of the gully. In the meantime the Turks had retreated, and after an hour or so a pair of New Zealand stretcher bearers came along and carried me about a mile and a half, in stages, to the beach.
It was now dark, and movement on the beach was being harassed by desultory shrapnel bursts from a big enfilading gun that later was christened "Anafarta Annie". Despite the fire, naval pinnances [pinnaces] came in to the little improvised jetty, and took me and other wounded back to the troopship I had left only three days before. The "Derfflinger" was now doing duty as a hastily improvised hospital ship. A scratch team of British and French, Naval and Military, surgeons had organised crude operating theatres in the dining and smoke rooms, but there were no trained nurses and only a few male medical orderlies. Worse still anasthetics [anaesthetics] were in very short supply and only the most urgent cases were being treated on board: minor operations and amputations were being performed without anasthesia [anaesthesia]. I was not classed as an urgent case and I was dumped into a bunk in a cabin, and left to myself with my paralyzed leg. As luck would have it, my batman had been pressed into nurse-orderly service, and discovered me later, so he was able to visit and wait on me a little during the nightmare two-day run to Alexandria. Men were dying by the score on the way down, and during each of the two nights the ship stopped twice for an hour, to put the dead overboard. My batman was kept busy helping to cut lengths of steel chain to weight the canvas hammocks in which the corpses were committed to the deep. The ship was being driven at her best speed and vibrated uncomfortably, being high out of the water with no cargo in her holds. The "Derfflinger" was truly a Death Ship and the screams and groans of the wounded and dying never ceased the whole trip.