A fighter with a a blood-stained eye patch ran wailing out of the makeshift morgue Friday at a field hospital on the western edge of Sirte. Inside four bodies lay wrapped in grey blankets tied with white ribbon.
An ambulance, one of a stream, screeched to a halt outside. Medics swung open the doors and carried out a sheet filled with body parts.
The chaotic scenes at the hospital in a derelict building played out as a few kilometres to the east National Transitional Council fighters pressed what appeared to be their final push to take Moamer Kadhafi's home town.
The constant boom of explosions and the distant rat-tat-tat of machine guns competed with the wailing of sirens of ambulances that streamed in to the hospital, ferrying the wounded and the dead from the front line.
"Allahu akbar!" (God is greatest) cried the crowd of Kalashnikov-toting NTC fighters milling around as ambulance after ambulance arrived with its grim cargo.
By early afternoon at least nine bodies had been brought in and medics said they had recorded at least 115 wounded. The toll rose rapidly as the day wore on.
Medics wheeled the wounded inside to an emergency treatment room where doctors in blue medical garb rushed from patient to patient to treat wounds inflicted by shrapnel, bullets and mortar fire.
A trail of blood led up the steps to the treatment room, where in one corner a man calmly lit incense sticks.
In the room next door lay the men who didn't make it. Their bodies were laid out in a neat line at the back.
Outside, a young man dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck, stood and wept.
His comrade-in-arms, a 20-year-old who was also his neighbour in the city of Misrata, was one of the men on thee floor in the makeshift morgue.
He died when a rocket-propelled grenade smashed into his pick-up truck as his unit was trying to fight its way inside Sirte from waste ground on the city's southern outskirts.
"We're trying to make sure he gets to his family quickly. Then we will go back to the fight," said Hakim Majook. "He's not the first friend I've lost. But the men who die will go to heaven."
The fighter with the eye-patch ran like a crazed man around the hospital compound, screaming and shaking off friends who tried to console him.
Earlier, a group of men stood around the open back doors of a white van and chanted prayers.
Inside lay four bodies, also wrapped in grey blankets tied with white ribbon. A sheet of paper bearing the fighter's name was stuck to each one's chest. The doors closed and the van drove off, as yet more ambulances hurtled into the hospital compound.