I am ashamed to say that I simply cowered, fearful for my life. The hollow offered little protection but it was sufficient that it shielded me from rifle fire. I willed myself flat against the cold curvature of the divot and waited. Waited but could not rest. The blasts felt so close. The pressure beat against my ears with each explosion and left a short impossible silence. As reality returned, from the trenches, I could hear men shouting, and from other holes in No Man’s Land I could hear men screaming. We were feet apart, but they could not be helped. Not now. I still had my medical equipment and a supply of morphia, but having been caught in the open and made cover, the dash across open ground would have been suicide.

I lay as motionless as I could without becoming a corpse and waited. And listened. Waiting for the thump of the mortars and the whistle. I knew it was coming. The next wave of the attack would commence, more men would storm over the top of the trench and, under the cover of smoke, advance toward the enemy, past my position and past those men I needed to reach. I just needed the smoke to hide my run. Every second counted but I had to wait.

There. The muffled charges from inside the trench sent smoke canisters over my head to mask the next assault. The Germans knew, of course, and immediately opened up with machine guns randomly into the smoke knowing that British soldiers would be somewhere in there. But this was the moment. Gathered, I shot from my resting place and headed parallel to the trenches keeping as low as speed would allow. The first man I found had been cut through by an earlier encounter with the machine guns. It could not have been his screams I had heard. But, his companion, a sergeant, his three stripes clearly visible through the mud and blood coating his jacket, was still alive. A shattered tibia was exposed through his trousers, material from which the soldier had inexpertly converted into a tourniquet and a muddied dressing. He would lose his leg, but his life could be saved. He could wait until dark. Swiftly moving to the next group, I found a terrified young boy, surely no more than 15, with little physically wrong but unable to move himself. Co-opting him with stern orders, shouted partly for effect and mostly because the battle now raged, we moved together searching for more wounded. At the next stop, a shallow potential grave, we found an older private, slumped forward almost doubled up and moaning. A bullet had ripped into his abdomen. He had done a good job of reducing his blood loss, but he needed a scaple and we could not do it here.

We dragged him 30 yards back to our trenches to a stretcher bearer party who were ready with more morphia. And I reported back for duty and reported the locations of the casualties I had found. “Crickey Doc, We thought you were dead”.