A man who had been wounded in the counterattack — hit by rifle fire, or by mortar shrapnel, or by a grenade — might have been conscious or unconscious. If conscious, he would have been aware that the rest of the company had descended the cliff. He might have been able to see the cliff’s edge from where he lay. He might have been in significant pain, particularly if he had not received morphine. He might have been losing blood.
The noise of combat would have been present — ongoing fire from Japanese positions at the top and continuing engagement at the bottom. The clifftop was not a quiet place in which a patient waited calmly for assistance; it was an active combat zone where the enemy held portions of the high ground.
Into this situation came one man, unarmed, wearing a medic’s kit, moving from patient to patient. He assessed each man’s wounds, treated what he could in the field — applying dressings, managing bleeding, offering what comfort was possible — and then prepared each man for the descent. The preparation for the descent would have required some physical handling of each patient, positioning him on the litter, securing him for a rope lowering down a cliff face.
The descent itself, for a seriously wounded man, would have been its own ordeal. Being lowered on a rope-suspended litter down a cliff face is not gentle; the litter moves and swings, and a patient with significant wounds would have felt every motion. But being lowered was survival, and the alternative to being lowered was remaining at the top of a Japanese-held escarpment.