Richard Fidler

He had planned to go ashore not with his battalion, which was in the third wave, but he wanted to go with the first wave.

There was a very strict order given.

No chaplains were to go ashore and Dexter was watched and so he wasn't allowed to go.

It was a shattering experience for him.

Now, he'd seen war before, but he's seeing, as you say, these wounded men coming ashore.

And he actually recognises the body of one of his wife's relatives in the bottom of a ship who'd passed away.

Dexter writes in his diary, While I write, I feel I want to cry, shattered limbs, bullets in the head, through the body, and in every conceivable manner.

And yet with a smile they will say to me, All right, doctor, tend to this other poor fellow first.

And all the time they are in pain with their bandages solid with stale blood.

I wanted to bubble and cry and take them in my arms and soothe them, for their nerves were all racked as well as their actual wounds.

Instead, I joked with them and made them laugh and gave them cigarettes to smoke while I pulled the hard bandage from the wounds.

The grateful looks on their faces as the wounds were freshly dressed were something to remember.

It's deeply moving.

It's one of the most moving things he's written.

He's not a man prone to put his feelings on paper, but I feel there are points where his experiences are such that he can't do anything else.

It's an attempt to deal with the horror and the grief and the trauma.

He did.

He was a realist.

He got particularly angry.

The hospital ship went to Egypt to drop off patients and then to Malta because there wasn't room in Egypt for all the wounded.