The next day came with a hot sun, and clouds of flies. Also there came many more wounded to the Valley of Torment, until the tale of living men exceeded four hundred. And that day many died. Among those who lived the torture from tourniquets that had been left too long on wounded limbs became unendurable. Many of them will never recover the free use of the limbs so tortured; others have already died from the unavoidable mortification which resulted from this long delay.
Meanwhile, down at the dressing stations, the weary doctors were struggling with hundreds of cases just as bad, and men seriously wounded were waiting by scores for their turn for attention. These are the necessary evils of war, accentuated at Gallipoli by the very rough nature of the country in which the fighting took place, and by the severity of the struggle and the importance of the issues depending upon its outcome.
At last that day ended too, and evening fell with a cool breeze. The exhausted men heard the stealthy approach of many men in the dark, from the safe gully that lay beyond the range. And one of them, out of thankfulness, began to sing the hymn--
At even, ere the sun was set, The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay.
While they were still singing, there came over the ridge a large number of soldiers, and put them all on stretchers. Then the new-comers, some thousands in number, ranged themselves in two rows facing one another. The double row of soldiers stretched up to the crest of the ridge, and down the other side into the safe gully that was there. And each stretcher was passed from hand to hand, up the steep ridge and down the slope to the safety that lay on the other side.
When all had been taken from the Valley of Torment, a long procession of men with stretchers was formed, bearing the wounded down to the sea. Two miles it stretched from start to finish, and it serpentined slowly down the gully, each pair of bearers walking with slow care, for the sake of the tortured man who was in their charge.
So the wounded men of New Zealand were carried out of the Valley of Torment. One could fill whole volumes about the tender care of the lightly wounded for their more grievously injured comrades, and of the stoical indifference to pain and personal suffering shown by these men. I have met many of the men who suffered there; and I know that in their eyes the real tragedy of the experience is not the torture they experienced. It is that, after all, their comrades eventually had to forgo the advantage that had been won by so much hardihood and loss of life.