Editor’s Note: Warning: This story contains graphic imagery.
At a field hospital close to the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut under siege, a buzzer sounds. Patients start to come in.
Orderlies and doctors jump to their feet. The doors – closed to keep out a bitter chill – are pinned back. Seconds later, a trolley rushes in.
Stretched out, a muddied soldier lays — one leg of his trouser pants obliterated.
He’s whisked inside a triage room to be stabilized. A scream of pain comes from behind the closed door.
In the hallway, what’s left of his trousers are picked apart by staff for documents and evidence of what happened.
A finger-sized piece of shrapnel is dug out. The tourniquet used to stem blood loss is extracted from the heap.
Once sorted, the mess of mangled cloth is placed in a black bin bag, along with the remnants of other war-wounded soldiers’ belongings.
Blood on the floor is quickly mopped up but the rusty stench remains.
Later, this soldier is moved and carried out on another trolley to an awaiting ambulance.
“Cold, cold,” he says. “Where is my leg?”
Outside, ashen-faced soldiers pile out of the back of an army truck. They move slowly, some with limps, through the doors of the cramped field hospital.
A quick triage is carried out, their injuries marked down on clipboards. They wait quietly to be seen and then moved on to better-equipped hospitals further back from the front.
Their faces sullen and exhausted, the walking wounded come outside to smoke. Some have concussions, some have bruises, says a soldier named Vasyl.
“I was concussed hard a couple of times. My shoulder was bruised because I was hit by a wall. And my ribs hurt, my chest,” he says before our conversation is cut short by the arrival of another ambulance.
The patients, briefly here, are kept company and watched over by visiting priests. Those worse off, with limbs torn and blasted, are prayed for in the hallway.
It’s a rinse and repeat system. Day and night, the casualties pour in — and the doctors do what they can.
“We need weapons, and we need them now. Not next month, now,” one porter says, in a brief break from moving patients.
Bloodied stretchers, discarded medical gloves and foil “space blankets” litter the ground outside.
Here the war is all too real, the casualties unavoidable.
Watch CNN’s Sam Riley report from the ground:
