My Circassian servant Ahmet had to go back to the ranks, much to his disgust, when I went away, and from that time forward his lot was by no means such a happy one as before. Instead of leisurely cooking my pilaf, grooming my horse, and occasionally raiding the country for hay, poultry, eggs, or anything else that he could get for his own benefit as well as mine, the poor fellow had to take his place in the wet trenches, with no bed but a hole scooped in the clay, and little to expect in the way of breakfast except a bullet.
Dr. Stoker had about twenty smooth-running ambulance waggons specially built for the conveyance of wounded men, and having loaded these up with the most dangerous cases he set out on the long journey to Sofia. Having no further use for a horse, I sold mine to Dr. Mackellar, and took my passage in one of the ambulance waggons. Then the night before I left Plevna the other fellows gave us a great send off and we had a splendid supper at the house of Dr. Robert, who, I regret to say, became hopelessly intoxicated, and insisted on yelling patriotic songs in half a dozen languages, while he thumped his piano until the yellow-faced Viennese housekeeper hauled him off in wrath and turned us all out. Poor Robert! Long before this we had eaten all his zoological specimens, his tame deer as well as his poultry; but he forgave us all. I never saw him again.
Old Mustapha Bey was quite concerned when I told him that I was going away. I had won the goodwill of this crusty old colonel of a regiment of cavalry some weeks before by the promise of a gift of some real Scotch whisky, which the old chap had read of but never tasted. He was an inveterate toper when he got the chance, being in this respect quite a rarity in the Ottoman army, and would drink raki or anything else with a fine, generous disregard of quality as long as the quantity was there. My friend Mr. Wrench, who was then the British consul in Constantinople, and who has lately died, promised to send me up a case of real Scotch whisky, and it came up in the previous train of arabas. At least the case came up all right, but of the dozen bottles only two remained for the disappointed consignee—myself. Of course we had a general jollification, and the last drop of genuine Glenlivet had vanished down the capacious gullet of an Austrian medico before I remembered with a pang of regret my promise to Mustapha Bey. Fortunately he had never tasted whisky, so there was still a possibility of keeping faith with him, at any rate in appearance. I confided my predicament to my comrades, and we brewed a special cuvée réservée for the Turk. The basis, I recollect, consisted of a decoction of prunes boiled with some of the wine of the country, which was heavily loaded with kerosene or some other mineral oil, and brought to the right amber hue by the addition of a little harmless colouring matter. This salubrious beverage I filtered through a sponge, bottled in one of the empty whisky bottles, and sent to Mustapha Bey with my compliments. When I next met him, he was smacking his lips with retrospective gusto, declaring that he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life. Poor old fellow! I felt quite guilty when I went to say good-bye to him, especially when he added at the last, "Be sure when you come back to bring me up another bottle of Scotch whisky."
Next morning I went away in one of the smoothly running ambulance cars brought up by Dr. Stoker. I had a pair of horses, and drove them down to Telish, where we stayed the first night. It was a mercy that we were able to get on in front of the long line of about three hundred arabas, each drawn by two small white oxen and laden with wounded. The carts creaked along at about two miles an hour, and as we passed them the groans and cries which the excruciating agony forced from the unfortunate sufferers were most painful to hear. Some of the men had fractures which remained unset, and the torture produced by the broken ends of bone jarring together as the waggon jolted and bumped over the rough road can be left to the imagination. Most of the men, however, bore their dreadful sufferings with a grim silence that was as painful as the cries. Oh that ghastly journey of wounded men to Sofia! And here and there a cart would stop while the driver lifted out a dead man from among his still living fellow travellers, and laid him down by the side of the road, at rest at last from the fearful jolting of the araba. There was no time to dig a grave, so the body was left there to soak in the rain and bleach in the sun, along the white road that wound from Plevna to Orkhanieh. I have no means of knowing accurately what proportion of the wounded died on the road, but I should estimate it at about 7 per cent. Had they been left behind at Plevna, probably at least 50 per cent, would have been swept away by septic disease and slow starvation.
At Telish, where we spent the first night, I found Hakki Pasha in command, and was very kindly treated by him. This was the scene of a severe fight about a fortnight after we passed through.
After three days' travelling we reached Orkhanieh, our first stopping-place of any considerable size; and here a number of the wounded who could go no farther were placed in the hospital. At Orkhanieh the hospital arrangements were a welcome change from those at Plevna. I met a man named Temple Bey there, an Englishman, who had been in the Turkish service for a great number of years. There were several English surgeons, and suitable houses had been turned into hospitals. I met a man named Roy, and another named Gill, now a well known practitioner at Welshpool; a man named Pinkerton, working at the hospitals in Orkhanieh; and there I said good-bye to my friend Dr. Mackellar, who remained behind to perform some operations, and stayed there for a considerable time. When I was leaving him, he kindly gave me a letter to Baron Munday, an Austrian doctor, who was an enthusiast in the cause of philanthropy, and who afterwards showed me great kindness in Constantinople.
At Sofia I met Lady Strangford, who had a well equipped hospital, worked by three or four English doctors and several English nurses. There were fifty or sixty beds in it, and the contrast between this hospital and the dreadful place that I had left behind at Plevna was as startling as the difference between an "Inferno" and a "Paradiso." Lady Strangford gave me a letter to the Baroness von Rosen, who had another hospital at Adrianople, and I spent a couple of pleasant days with that enthusiastic lady. Going on to Ichtiman, I met there Fano Bey, who was the second military officer in charge of the hospitals at Widdin; and as he arrived late at night, I was glad of the opportunity of repaying some of his past kindnesses by giving up my room to him. Next day we went on to Tatar Bazardjik, which was the terminus of the railway from Constantinople; and there, in the company of half a dozen jolly war correspondents, I shook off the last traces of the depression engendered by the horrors of my hospital work in Plevna.
Life in Constantinople—Sir Collingwood Dickson—Visit to the Seraskierat—Roving Englishmen—A Typical Adventurer—War Correspondents—General Berdan—Colonel Valentine Baker—A Picnic on the Gulf of Ismet—On Board H.M.S. Achilles—The Turks as Paymasters—A Heavy Fee—Round the Cafés Chantants—An Invitation to Erzeroum—Road to Plevna closed—I join the Stafford House Ambulance—A Farewell Banquet—A Voyage in the Black Sea—Trebizond—In the Cradle of Humanity—The Road of Xenophon's Ten Thousand—Lazistan—Dog and Wolf—An Ancient Mining Town—The Valley of Pear Trees—Baiburt—Cross and Crescent in Former Days—A Mountain Road—Genoese Ruins—A Hasty Descent—On the Kopdagh—The Garden of Eden—First Glimpse of the Euphrates—Sir Arnold Kemball—Erzeroum at Last—English Doctors—Mr. Zohrab—Mukhtar Pasha—Organizing our Hospitals—Sunlight and Shadow—A Presage of Trouble.
In Constantinople I put up again at Misserie's Hotel. During the fifteen months that had elapsed since I last saw that comfortable hostelry I had lived a whole lifetime, and coming back to it again, a war-worn veteran of twenty-three, the French cooking and the soft beds after many a dinner of raw maize cobs and many a sleep on the bare earth appealed to my feelings in the most convincing manner possible.
At this time the eyes of the world were turned towards Plevna, and I found, somewhat to my astonishment, that my name was already fairly well known in Stamboul. Every one was anxious to hear something of the famous victories that had just been won from an eye-witness, and I had to fight my battles over again in the club and the café, the bureau and the boudoir, for the benefit of hundreds of patriotic inquirers all eager for the latest news. Among others I met General Sir Collingwood Dickson, an old Crimea man, who was intensely interested in the operations against the enemy, whose grey coats he had seen in front of him some three and twenty years before at Alma and at Inkermann. It was wonderful to see the warrior's eyes flashing with the battle-light again, as I told him the story of the Krishin redoubts—how Skobeleff took them and held them for one desperate day and night, and how, after many repulses, the Ottoman troops at five o'clock on the following afternoon poured over the parapets in a mighty, irresistible wave and swept the Russians back to the Green Hills once more.
Taking Osman Pasha's letter with me, I paid a visit to the Seraskierat, and, having presented my introduction, was welcomed most warmly by the officers of the War Office, who thanked me on behalf of the Turkish Government for my services. Up to this time the Ottoman troops had been making a very good fight of it on the whole, in spite of the losses at the Shipka Pass and on the Lom; and the brilliant victories which Osman Pasha had been winning encouraged the officers of the Seraskierat to hope for further successes. It is perhaps outside my purpose here to criticise in detail the conduct of the operations by the Turkish Government; but I cannot help referring to the opinion which was very generally expressed outside that the mismanagement and divided control at headquarters were entirely responsible for the headway which the enemy had made up to the present, and that if the brilliant qualities of the Turkish forces in the field had been supported by a more rational and consistent policy at Constantinople the peaked caps of the Russians would never have been seen before Stamboul.
My mother, whom I was very anxious to see, was in England at this time, and I had written to her upon my arrival in Constantinople. While I waited to get a reply from her, I had plenty of time to look about me and see the change which had taken place in the daily life of the Turkish capital since my previous visit. Upon the outbreak of a war the adventurers of all nations seem to emerge from their hiding-places, and flock to the scene of action for the profit, the pleasure, or the excitement that they can pick up. The carcase, in fact, was there, and one could see the eagles gathering together from every quarter. I met a good many Englishmen of the roving, dare-devil class that has done so much to build up our own empire, and here in default of an outlet among Christian nations they were trying all they knew to get into the Turkish army. Many of them had a special axe to grind of some sort. They had inventions, new weapons, or improved clothing, or equipment which they desired to sell to the Turkish Government. For instance, there was a man called Harris, who had a scheme for blowing up the bridge across the Danube at Sistova with torpedoes, and was very anxious that I should join him in his absurd scheme. His idea was to send down the river a small fleet of torpedoes which would destroy the bridge as soon as they came into contact with it. How the destruction of the bridge could hinder the advance of the Russians or alter the course of the campaign he loftily declined to explain, and my stupidity was such that I missed this unique opportunity of securing fame and fortune at a blow. Another man whom I met belonged to a species which is fairly well distributed—more's the pity—over the outlying portions especially of the British Empire. He was gentlemanly, well dressed, and by no means presuming. He talked well, and evidently knew the world. One would take him to be about thirty-five years of age, though the lines in his forehead and round the mouth and the streaks of grey in his hair showed that he had lived all the time. He took a tremendous interest in the fighting round Plevna, and he invited me to dinner with him one evening. Let us call him Smith, although that was not his name. Well, I had a very excellent dinner; and when it was over I had to pay for it myself, as also for Mr. Smith's own well selected repast and bottle of Château Léoville. Over the cigars afterwards he casually asked me to lend him five pounds; but I found, to my regret, that I had not got the money on me.
If there were plenty of adventurers in Constantinople just then, there were also plenty of sterling, good fellows always ready to do one a good turn without any ulterior object. I made a delightful acquaintance, for instance, when I met Charles Austin, a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, who had gone out to Constantinople to act as special correspondent for the Times. Another capital fellow was Frank Ives Scudamore, whom every one in Constantinople knew. He was the head of the British post-office there; and when I told him that I had spent twenty pounds of my own money in telegraphing to the Standard from Widdin when their own correspondent went away, Scudamore paid me the money out of his own pocket, telling me that he would get it from the paper. His son was acting as the correspondent for some London paper too, and I saw a good deal of him. The names of the Englishmen whom I met in the town at that exciting time would fill many pages; but I can mention a few of them. There was Colonel Valentine Baker, for instance (Baker Pasha), who was accounted one of the finest cavalry officers in Europe, and was engaged in reorganizing the gendarmerie. He had picked out a lot of retired English officers for positions, and among them I met Colonel Swire, Colonel Norton, Colonel Alix, and a fire-eating, devil-may-care Irishman named Briscoe, who had been in the Guards, and who was the life and soul of the club. An exceptionally interesting old chap was General Berdan, the inventor of the Russian rifle that bore his name. I looked at the harmless, gentle old chap with considerable awe when I recollected the awful scenes in my hospital and the deadly evidences of the hard-hitting Berdan bullets. There were several fellows who had failed in examinations at Sandhurst or Woolwich, and were now hunting for glory where they fancied that a good seat on horseback would be more serviceable than trigonometry and a fair shot with the revolver would be more valuable than the most intimate acquaintance with the differential calculus. A Sir Peter Something-or-other, who was trying to sell uniforms to the Turkish Government, completes the list of my personal club acquaintances.
During the few days that I was at Constantinople, Valentine Baker organized a delightful picnic to the Gulf of Ismet, where the British fleet were lying, and he invited me to join the party. We went up the Gulf of Ismet in a small steamer, and at Prinkapo we took on board an addition to our party including several ladies.
After a few hours' steaming, we came in sight of the ships of the British squadron riding at anchor on the blue waters of the gulf; and fighting though I had been under the Turkish flag, I felt a thrill of pride as our little launch passed under the stern of the mighty Téméraire and I saw the dear old ensign flying over me again. Those were stirring times in international politics, for word had been passed round in high diplomatic circles as well as on the stages of the London music-halls that "the Russians shall not have Constantinople," and the presence of the Achilles, the Alexandra, the Téméraire, and the other ships of Admiral Hornby's squadron almost within shell fire of Stamboul showed that Great Britain had made up her mind definitely upon this point.
We lunched with Commodore Hewitt on board the Achilles, and after lunch we had plenty of time to examine the equipment of that splendid fighting machine. As I watched the ladies in their white dresses tripping along the snowy decks and peering down the sights of the great, silent, burnished guns that pointed out towards Stamboul, I thought of those other guns that I had left behind at Plevna, grim, powder-blackened, blood-bespattered veterans, that continued their deadly work until, broken and dismounted, with their gun crews lying round them, they were silenced at last in the Krishin redoubts.
We had a delightful day with the squadron, and in the evening we steamed back to the city of many minarets, upon which the eyes of Europe were day by day directed. At Prinkapo I met a man called Pearse, a brother Australian. He was the first graduate in law from the Adelaide University. He had a big practice at the bar in the English court at Constantinople, and we had much to tell each other of our adventures since we crossed the line.
My friend Mr. Wrench, the British consul at Constantinople, was extremely kind to me, and I ventured to approach him upon a somewhat delicate question. Much as I admired the character of the Turkish troops and their soldierly qualities in the field, I could not be blind to one conspicuous defect in Turkish official nature. It was plain from the first that the executive had a rooted dislike to paying over a single piastre to any one for services rendered. The pay of the troops was months in arrear, and my own little bill was mounting up to a quite portentous figure. Perhaps it occurred to the paymaster of the forces that it would be folly to hand over good money to a man who might have his pockets carried away together with his legs by a convenient shell at any moment. At any rate the fact remained that I was owed about £70 by the Turkish Government at this time; and as I had no hopes of recovering my medical fees by my own unaided efforts, I laid the matter before Mr. Wrench.
Mr. Wrench had lived long in Constantinople, and was intimately acquainted with all the devious approaches to the ear of officialdom. I do not know how many cups of coffee he was obliged to drink, nor how many artfully worded compliments he paid to solemn old pashas sitting cross-legged on their divans; but I do know that in a remarkably short time, considering the length and tortuosity of the negotiations which he must have gone through, he was able to announce to me that the arrears of my salary of £200 a year would be paid on application. When I put in my claim for £70, they brought me the whole amount in silver coin, and I had to get a small hand-cart to remove my money, which consisted of about half a hundredweight of Turkish medjidies. It was certainly the heaviest fee that I have ever received for professional services.
In order to be more in the swim, so that I could hear prompt news of all that was going on at the seat of war, I left Misserie's Hotel, and took up my quarters at the club in the Grande Rue de Pera. This was a very comfortable and very cosmopolitan caravanserai, and the members included the leading section of the foreign element in Constantinople. Here I met again many of my old acquaintances, among them being the Hon. Randolph Stewart, the Queen's Messenger, who had come down the Danube with me when I first entered Turkish territory. I found plenty of congenial spirits in the club, and devoted a day or two to well deserved relaxation, which was readily obtainable in Constantinople. In the evenings we used to go the round of the cafés chantants, and always found lots of fun there. One night a French girl came forward on the stage, and sang a song about Plevna, which was rapturously applauded. While the song was going on somebody spotted me in the audience, and I was accorded a demonstration which, although it was highly flattering, was nevertheless decidedly embarrassing.
While I was amusing myself with these frivolities, the most momentous events were occurring at the theatre of war. In Asiatic Turkey the Russians were making rapid headway, and I learned from Mr. Barrington Kennett, the head of the Stafford House Relief Committee, who was then in Constantinople, that the condition of the Turkish garrison of Erzeroum was deplorable. Medical aid was urgently required there, and Mr. Barrington Kennett offered me an engagement at once to take charge of the ambulance work at Erzeroum for the Stafford House Committee. I was offered far better terms than I was getting from the Turks, and a free hand to do what I liked at Erzeroum; but I determined not to desert my old friends at Plevna, and made up my mind to get back there as soon as I had seen my mother. Mr. Barrington Kennett asked me to reserve my final decision, and when I left him the offer was still open.
On the very same day something occurred which compelled me to change my plans. Sir Collingwood Dickson sent me a telegram asking me to call upon him at once in the summer residence of the British Embassy at Therapia, and in an interview which I had with him there he told me that news had just been received of terrible fighting at Gorny Dübnik and Telish. The Russian Guards had been brought up, and after a desperate battle at Telish in which the Russians lost four thousand men the Turkish forces sustained a complete defeat. As a result of this victory the Russians were in possession of all the approaches to Plevna, and communication with Osman Pasha's army was absolutely cut off. I listened to this news with dismay, for it was clear now that I could not get back to Plevna; and that night as I lay in bed at the club I made up my mind to accept the offer of the Stafford House Committee and go to Erzeroum.
Before I was up in the morning Mr. Barrington Kennett came into my room and told me that he had received a telegram from Erzeroum giving the news of a sanguinary battle close to that place. Mukhtar Pasha had suffered a terrible defeat, and the condition in Erzeroum was desperate. The town was full of wounded men, and supplies of all kinds were urgently needed. Mr. Kennett asked me to start that day at twelve o'clock as there was a steamer going, and he offered to give me any one I liked to go with me, suggesting that I should take a dragoman and Captain Morisot, whom I had already met at Plevna, as a companion. Mr. Stoney, who also belonged to the Stafford House Committee, and who had treated me with the greatest kindness, also urged me to accept the offer; and the upshot of it all was that I told Mr. Kennett that I would be ready to start by the steamer at twelve o'clock.
Steamers, however, suffer from unpunctuality in Turkey as well as elsewhere, and at the last moment we found that the boat would not start until next morning. Baron Munday heard of this, and gave a grand farewell dinner to me at the club that night, when about a dozen of us sat down to a regular banquet, and drank each other's healths in bumpers of champagne. In those old fighting days a farewell dinner to any one was a thing to wonder at; for it was always a shade of odds that a fever or a rifle-bullet would claim a good many of the guests before they could meet again, and the more risky the prospects of the future the more lively was the certain pleasure of the present. Late that night, or rather early next morning, they saw me down to the quay where the Messageries boat was lying, and I went on board, lugging with me a bag containing three hundred English sovereigns—perhaps the only coins on earth that will fetch their face value anywhere. With me there went Dr. Woods, an adventurous spark from the north of Ireland, who was deputed to act with me, Captain Morisot, and Mr. Harvey.
A fine old Frenchman commanded the little Messageries steamer, and by his manner and language he seemed a regular old aristocrat, who had not always been running a small "tramp" boat on the Black Sea. Although far from Paris, he had not forgotten the principles of gastronomy, and the cuisine on board that perambulating little tub was simply perfect. I had never lived so well in my life. We had a delightful passage up the Black Sea, calling in at the different ports on the north side, Sinope, Samsoun, and finally Trebizond, where we disembarked for the overland journey to Erzeroum.
Trebizond is a beautiful town built on a table-land at the top of high cliffs looking down over the Black Sea. There was a very good Greek hotel there, and we put up for the night in it. As soon as possible we called on Mr. Biliotti,[4] the English consul at Trebizond, and he gave us a message to push on to Erzeroum as quickly as possible, as Mukhtar Pasha was in urgent need of medical officers and stores.
With Mr. Biliotti we met Captain McCalmont, who was on the staff of Sir Arnold Kemball, the British military attaché in Asiatic Turkey. All the preliminaries for our journey had been settled by the indefatigable Mr. Biliotti; and as we had two dragomen, I left one of them, a man named Williams, behind us to bring on the heavy packages, the bandages, drugs, stimulants, and other medical stores, while we pushed forward with the other.
When we left Trebizond, our party consisted of Dr. Woods, Captain Morisot, Harvey, and myself. We started early in the morning for our long ride to Erzeroum through the wild and picturesque country which ethnologists and philologists have alike decided upon as the cradle of the human race, and where biblical legend, agreeing with the conclusions of science, has placed the primitive Garden of Eden. The road that we travelled was a splendid one, macadamized nearly all the way, and built in that solid and enduring form that men gave to their highways before the railways came to compete with them. It was this road that Xenophon travelled with his legions over two thousand years ago when they made their famous return march to Greece. Readers of that dead-and-gone Greek captain's diary will remember his explicit description of the journey, and his continually recurring remark that they came after a stage of so many "parasangs" to "a populous town, well watered, and situated on a river." Since Xenophon's day most of those populous towns have disappeared, and nothing is left but the beetling cliffs that frowned down upon the homeward marching Greeks, and the sea that ripples as fresh and blue to-day as when the hoplites and the bowmen saw it gleaming at last before them and ran forward with the glad, exulting cry, "Thalassa, Thalassa!"
The road is still divided into posts or stages, and we travelled from stage to stage with fresh post-horses. It was tiring work riding these rough and badly broken brutes, and Dr. Woods, who was an indifferent horseman, suffered very severely; but the excitement of the journey and the wildness of the scenery kept us up.
Our first day's journey was very picturesque, for the road wound along the side of a deep ravine for many miles, and then curled along the flanks of the hills that rose above us beautifully clad with hazel trees. We passed through a part of the district of Lazistan, and were much struck by the magnificent type of men that we saw there, tall, straight, muscular fellows, lithe and hardy as the mountain ash. Perhaps it is true that this country is the real cradle of the human race, and that from there the tide of migration flowed westward over Europe, sending one tributary stream down into Greece, and another down into Italy, and passing onwards in ever increasing volume, until it spread population, not only through Western Europe, but away, as industrious archæologists have whispered, conning their strange finds among the Incas of Peru and Mexico, to the great Western continent that lay beyond the fabled inland of Atlantis. At any rate those who hold to this theory might find support for it in the magnificent physique of the present population of this primeval country. At times, when a sick man is sent back to breathe the air of his native place after a lifetime spent in some distant city, he gathers new health and strength in some mysterious way. So tired humanity, sick and undersized in Western Europe, regains its pristine vigour and development among the mountains and ravines where it first saw the light.
Not only were these men of Lazistan very fine fellows themselves, but we saw that they possessed some magnificent dogs, powerfully built, shaggy coated animals, with enormous muscular strength. These dogs were greatly prized by their owners; and though I tried hard to secure one by purchase, I failed. They are used to guard the flocks of their masters, and many a fierce duel has been fought at night between a grey old wolf, impelled by hunger to attack the sheep, and the grim custodian of the flock. In the winter all the mountains in Lazistan are covered with snow for months, and the white covering of those lonely grassy slopes is often stained by the traces of these battles à outrance.
After completing our first day's journey, we came in the evening to a small village, where we put up at a filthy little khan, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. We had brought plenty of food with us, and our principal discomfort was as usual occasioned by the fleas, which were as pertinacious as those which Thackeray has depicted as pulling the Kickleburys out of bed during their famous excursion up the Rhine.
On the second day we were able to push on a good deal faster as the road was more level, and in the evening we came to the small township of Ghumish Khané, which was chiefly known to fame owing to the existence of some very old silver mines in the neighbourhood. To an Australian like myself it did not look at all like a mining township. Where were the familiar poppet heads, the heaps of mullock, and the diligently fossicked alluvial? There was no roar of stampers, no monotonous gurgle of pumps, and there was not one decent bush shanty in the place. We had seen enough of the comforts of a khan on the previous night, so like wise men we went straight to the hammam, or Turkish bath, with which even the smallest Turkish township is always provided. Here we enjoyed the refreshing luxury of being well steamed; and backsheesh, in the shape of a few piastres to the man in charge, procured for us permission to sleep on the divans provided for patrons of the establishment. We had supper and spent the night in the hammam.
Leaving Ghumish Khané next morning, we rode on through a narrow valley between two ranges of hills covered with hazel trees and other light scrub. In this valley, which was about seven miles long by half a mile wide, we found magnificent groves of pear trees fringing the road on either side. When we passed through in the middle of autumn, the fruit was just ripe, and the great juicy pears almost knocked against our faces as we rode on under the trees with the branches interlacing overhead. We telegraphed to the kaimakan at Baiburt, our next stopping-place, before leaving Ghumish Khané, in order that accommodation might be prepared for us; and when we reached Baiburt in the evening, we were agreeably surprised to find it an extremely beautiful town. Baiburt, like all the towns in that country, is a place of grey antiquity. It sleeps on in the present, dreaming of the past and of all the wars that have raged about it since the first men of Baiburt built themselves defences against the robbers of the hills hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. It was taken by the Russians in 1828, after the massacres in the Ægean Sea had roused England, France, and Russia to take joint action against the Turks, and had whetted the thirst for blood once more by precipitating Navarino. Looking at the majestic ruins of this town of Baiburt and at the traces of their presence, left there by the Russian cannoneers, one thought of the causes that had brought about these ruins; one thought of the Greek struggle for independence, and of the massacres at Chios and the adjacent islands; one thought of Byron singing of "The Isles of Greece," with his passionate appeal against "Turkish force and Latin fraud," and of Béranger stirring all Europe with the lament of the heroic Ipsariotes, "Les rois chrétiens ne nous vengeront pas."
After leaving Baiburt we got among the mountains again, and rode along a track hewn out of the side of the hills that almost overhung us, a road that reminded one in places of the magnificent solitudes of the Julier Pass in Switzerland, and at times brought back the softer beauties of the track from Hobart to the Huon River in Tasmania.
On either side of the road grew groves of giant rhododendrons, making splashes of rich colour amid the green; and here and there the ruined castles, built by Genoese merchant princes to protect their commerce from the robbers of the hills, loomed in lonely state above us. Along this road in the Middle Ages came the greater part of the trade from Persia; and as the long caravan, laden with silks and spices, with fabrics from the Persian looms and precious stones from the Persian mines, made its way slowly towards the markets of Europe, it was no wonder that the brigands descended from their native fastnesses and risked a fight with the well armed escort that rode beside the treasures.
Inspired by a desire to get a nearer look at these romantic old ruins, I climbed up to the ridge upon which one of these castles was poised like an eagle's nest between earth and heaven; but I regretted my curiosity very quickly, for it was only with the utmost difficulty and most frantic clutching at convenient shrubs that I reached the road again with a wild glissade in which everything was forgotten except the instinctive desire to keep myself right side uppermost.
Towards evening we passed through a gloomy gorge where the cliffs rose perpendicularly on each side; and the air, never warmed by the sun's rays, was bitterly cold. Soon after emerging from this we came to a village whose name I have forgotten, and rode at once to the konak, or townhall, where we had a rest and a meal. Here I learnt that Sir Arnold Kemball was at Purnekapan, at the end of the next stage, and that he had with him Lieutenant Dugald of the royal navy as an attaché.
Having sent a telegram to Lieutenant Dugald notifying our approach, we resumed our journey, travelling over a pass which rose to a height of between six and seven thousand feet; and at the summit we halted for an hour at a place called the Kopdagh, from which there was a superb view over hills and valleys and distant mountain-peaks. Far away in front of us was the silver line of a river, the very name of which sent a thrill through our hearts. It was "that great river, the river Euphrates"; and as we looked down over the plain we realized, almost with a gasp of astonishment, that we were gazing at the legendary site of the Garden of Eden.
At Purnekapan I called on Sir Arnold Kemball, whom I had met previously at Nish during the Servian war. Sir Arnold Kemball had stirring news for us. He had just received a telegram from Erzeroum announcing that the Russians had delivered a terrific assault, and that the town had fallen into their hands.
Next morning we pushed on as fast as we could, crossed the Euphrates at midday, and at five o'clock in the afternoon we reached Erzeroum. As we entered the town we naturally expected to find the Russians in possession of the town; but we could see no trace of the well known uniforms, and gradually it dawned upon us that Sir Arnold Kemball had been misinformed when he told us that the long expected Russian assault had already been delivered.
We went straight to the British Consulate, and called upon Mr. Zohrab, our consul, who gave us a most cordial reception, and informed us of the position in the town, which was certainly serious. About a week before our arrival a desperate attack had been made by the Russians, who had taken one of the forts, and the Turks lost two thousand men in killed and wounded. Consequently the hospital resources were taxed to the utmost, although in addition to the Turkish medical staff there were several English doctors in Erzeroum before we got there. Lord Blantyre had sent up a number of English doctors at his own expense; but the total strength of the medical staff had been depleted by various accidents. Dr. Casson and Dr. Buckle, for instance, had been taken prisoners, and were then in the hands of the Russians; Dr. Guppy had died of typhoid fever about a week before we got there; and the available surgeons were Charles Fetherstonhaugh, James Denniston, whom I had known before in Edinburgh, and John Pinkerton. We took up our quarters with these three, in the great bare house where they lived without any furniture except a table and a couple of benches. There were no beds, so we slept on the floor; and our by no means luxurious meals were cooked for us by an Armenian named David whose son Siropé, commonly called Jonathan, acted as waiter and general factotum.
As soon as we were installed we had time to look round, and my first impression of Erzeroum was a very favourable one. I found that we had come to a very picturesque town, lying under the lee of a range of mountains which rose to a height of six thousand feet, the town itself being about four thousand feet above the sea level. A remarkable feature about the place was the entire absence of timber, which I noticed at once with the apprehension of an old campaigner who knew the value of a supply of fuel and the horrible discomfort of being without it. I found that the nearest timber was seventy miles away, where the great forest of Soghanli Dagh was situated. There were very few trees in the town, and the mountains were great masses of bare rock, without a trace of vegetation to hide their cold nakedness. Under these circumstances the inhabitants relied for fuel principally on dried camel's dung, which was a most precarious source of supply.
Erzeroum was surrounded by a great wall, strengthened by forts at intervals, and also by a moat and drawbridge. It was a very important town, because nearly all the trade from Teheran went through it; and it had a population of forty thousand inhabitants, most of whom were Armenians. The houses were strongly built of stone, with flat roofs, which were used by the inmates as promenades during the warm evenings; and the bright colours affected by the Turkish women in their dress lent colour and animation to the scene. The town contained several handsome Armenian churches, the inner walls of which were decorated with beautiful blue tiles; and the konak, or townhall, was a very handsome structure. The water supply was chiefly drawn from wells, and there was besides a small stream that came down from the mountains, while the Euphrates was only four miles away.
Mr. Zohrab, who was to all intents and purposes an Englishman, and had an English wife and two sons, introduced all of us newcomers to Mukhtar Pasha, the commander-in-chief, who welcomed us most kindly, and thanked us for coming. We found that Fetherstonhaugh, Denniston, and Pinkerton were in charge of a large hospital, which was known as Lord Blantyre's Hospital; and I arranged to take over from the Turks a large hospital which had been organized in the Yeni Khan. Pinkerton agreed to come over to me, as the other two could get through all the work at Lord Blantyre's Hospital; so Pinkerton, Woods, and myself, with Harvey and Captain Morisot as assistants, were installed in the Yeni Khan, and took over all the staff of assistants, servants, and jarra bashis that had been employed under the Turks. There were two of these jarra bashis; and one of them, a Turkish sergeant, who had been trained as a dresser, was one of the hardest and most conscientious workers as well as one of the best fellows that I met in Turkey. I agreed to pay all those whom I took over wages at the rate of half what they received from the Turkish Government in addition to their ordinary pay; and as they could never look forward with any degree of certainty to receiving their money from the Turks, they had an additional incentive to faithful service, and I was enabled to secure a direct control over them by holding the power of the purse. I also took on a Hungarian surgeon, named Schmidt, to assist us. He was given a room in the hospital, and was made the house surgeon; so that in cases of hæmorrhage there was always a competent person ready to arrest it until one of us could come up.
We soon had everything ship-shape in the old khan, which was converted into a well equipped hospital, containing at the outset three hundred beds. It was very different from the awful building that I had left behind in Plevna. The main ward of our Stafford House Hospital was a hundred feet long, with a width of sixty-five feet and a height of thirty feet. It was ventilated and lighted by means of large glass skylights, and warmed by two large stoves. This ward contained ninety-eight beds, and there was another large one containing sixty-two beds, while smaller rooms, opening off these large ones, provided accommodation for six or eight patients each, the total number of patients when I took over control being three hundred. We had an operating-room, a storeroom, and all the necessary offices. In the main wards the scene was almost picturesque, if any hospital ever could be picturesque; for the place was scrupulously clean, and the beds were dressed with Persian quilts, bright with the most gorgeous colours. As the midday sunbeams poured in through the skylights overhead, they lit up the scarlets and the greens, the cobalt blues and lemon yellows, the deep crimson of the rose, the pink of the geranium, and the purple of the violet, until the whole place looked like an immense garden full of flowers. But against this background of brilliant colours the white, drawn faces of the wounded soldiers stood out in pitiful contrast, and the gay hues only threw into still stronger relief the ghastly sufferings.
At first we had no cases of sickness, and none but wounded men to treat. Our death-rate was low—in the first week we only had six deaths out of three hundred patients, and we sent thirty men out cured to rejoin their regiments. After the hideous experiences in Plevna, this state of things was a blessed relief, and we became quite light-hearted. But before I left Erzeroum I had seen sufferings and horrors before which the sufferings and horrors of the Plevna hospital paled into insignificance.
The first sign of coming trouble was the discovery one morning of a case of genuine typhus and several cases of typhoid. These we sent away at once to the medical central hospital, as we took over our hospital with the stipulation that we were to treat only wounded cases. But that solitary case of typhus worried me a good deal, and it seemed to presage with dreadful certainty the mischief that was to come.
The Scourge of Typhus—Pyæmia and Pneumonia—Terrible Cold—Outposts frozen to Death—Fall of Kars—The March of the Wounded—One Hundred and Eighty Miles over the Snow—Ghastly Effects of Frostbite—The Skeleton Hands—Overcrowding in the Hospitals—Dr. Fetherstonhaugh falls Ill—A Strange Delusion—"After Long Years"—Edmund O'Donovan—A Circassian Dinner Party—Sucking-pig à l'Irlandaise—A Novel Target—Departure of Mr. Zohrab—We move into the Consulate—Exodus to Erzinghan—An Awful Sacrifice—Christmas in a Besieged Town—A Remarkable Plum Pudding—Illness of Pinkerton—Funerals in Erzeroum—Casting out the Dead—"The Lean Dogs beneath the Wall"—An Army Surgeon's Death—I fall Sick with Typhus—Heroic Devotion of James Denniston—Some of my Nurses—How I recovered—A Scientific Experiment—The Brain of a Comatose Person—Vachin's Discomfiture.
As we went round the hospital wards, now that fever had made its appearance, needless to say that we examined each patient anxiously, and every day we found three or four more cases of typhus among the wounded men. These we weeded out, and placed in a room specially prepared to receive them, for on account of the severity of their wounds we could not send them away to the central hospital.
Early in December the weather got very bad. There was a heavy fall of snow, and the hospitals were filled with sick, until altogether there were about four thousand sick and wounded in the town. Captain Morisot and Mr. Harvey were most valuable assistants; but in the first week of December Mr. Harvey, who was wanted at Constantinople, had to leave, much to our regret. Williams, our dragoman, who had been delayed on the road by the bad weather, came up with the stores, and took his place, turning out a very useful assistant.
Pyæmia began to make great ravages, and the intense cold increased the sufferings of the wounded. I amputated a man's arm at the shoulder joint, and hoped to pull him through; but the weather beat me, for he took pleurisy, and went off in a day.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself lived in the great, bare Armenian house with Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston. Every morning we went off to our respective hospitals, returned home to lunch, and then went back in the afternoon to work again. Wood for fuel cost us twopence per pound, and rations were poor and scarce; but we pegged away doggedly, and Mr. Zohrab was very good to us. He had a splendid house amply provisioned for the winter, and he was most hospitable in his invitations to dinner; while his wife, who was a charming Englishwoman, was always cheering us up, and his two sons often gave us a hand at the hospital.
An ominous silence was maintained by our Russian besiegers, and we found that they had withdrawn the greater number of the troops from Erzeroum in order to carry out the assault on Kars. Typhus, pyæmia, pneumonia, and the bitter, deadening cold were working for the Russians, and slew as many of the defenders of Erzeroum daily as would have fallen under the heaviest shell fire. Woods became ill; and as there was evidently heavy work before us, I sent him down to Constantinople, thus reducing the strength of our little medical garrison by one.
Snow began to fall heavily, and soon the streets were covered to a depth of several feet. At night the thermometer dropped to forty degrees below freezing-point, and the soldiers in the open suffered severely. Every morning five or six men were found frozen to death on outpost duty, lying in the snow with their eyes closed and their rifles clasped in their arms.
Meanwhile General Melikoff was making preparations for his great attack on Kars, and at last the long expected assault was delivered, and the Russians with their strange, untranslatable cry of "Nichivo," which is the ultimate expression of a reckless bravery that refuses to count any cost, swept in upon the Turkish batteries, and took the town.
Melikoff could not accommodate his numerous wounded prisoners with quarters, so he conceived the brilliant idea of sending them on to us; and, presenting each man who could walk with a blanket and a few piastres, he despatched the men on their journey from Kars to Erzeroum. What a march was that! The snow lay thickly on the frozen ground, and for league after league the legion of the wounded dragged themselves along, staining the snow with their blood as they "blazed" their pathway from Kars to Erzeroum. Hundreds dropped dead on that terrible march, and Mukhtar Pasha told me that out of two thousand men who left Kars only three hundred and seventeen reached Erzeroum. About fifty of the survivors came to our hospital, and one of them told me that he left with a party of thirty, only ten of whom came through alive, and of these ten no fewer than seven lost all their toes from frostbite.
Some typical cases of frostbite were grotesque in their ghastliness. Fancy the experience of two men who came to us for treatment after dragging their wounded bodies over the hundred and eighty miles of snow that separated Kars from Erzeroum. Their hands had been frost-bitten early in the march, and for the last week nothing was left but the skeleton of each hand from the wrist to the finger-tips. Every particle of flesh had rotted off, and the bones were black with decomposition. They came to me holding out their blackened skeleton hands feebly and pitifully before them, and I lopped off the maimed remnants at the wrists. Both these men died from the effects of that terrible march, which not even the lurid imagination of a Dante could easily rival.
We in our turn had to send out some of our lightly wounded men to relieve the congested hospitals and to diminish the chances of an epidemic. On Christmas Day we sent away sixty-six, most of whom were wounded in the hands or arms, and they started to march to Baiburt. We were able to give them warm jerseys, under-clothing, long stockings, and woollen comforters, thanks to the generosity of Lord Blantyre; and three days later we sent out another thirty, each of whom got ten piastres from Lord Blantyre's fund in addition to the clothes. All of the men reached Baiburt safely.
The hospitals were soon so crowded that typhus and typhoid fever raged with added violence, and hospital gangrene, that I had seen before in Plevna, once more made its dreaded appearance. We had eight cases in our hospital, and lost three of them. Pyæmia and frostbite were the other chief causes of mortality.
Pinkerton and I, with Morisot and Williams to help us, managed our three hundred beds fairly well; but it was a great blow to us when Williams took the fever, and was added to the sick list. When Pinkerton and myself met Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston in the evenings at dinner, we used to look at each other curiously, wondering which would be the first. It was Fetherstonhaugh. He was attacked by a kind of remittent fever, but tried to shake it off and went about his work as usual. One night, when the rest of us were at dinner, Fetherstonhaugh came into the dining-room, and remarked that there were three men with their throats cut in his room. We rushed in, but found nothing, and came to the conclusion that it was time Fetherstonhaugh left off work, so we sent him down to Trebizond.
That was the last that I saw of him for a long, long time; but the curious agency that for want of a better name we call coincidence brought us together again after many years in a strange way. It happened in Melbourne, when I had settled down to steady work at my practice, and had almost forgotten the stirring days in Asia Minor, except for a few rare glimpses when memory lifted the veil. I was engaged one day at the Supreme Court as a professional witness in some case; and when I stepped out of the box, it occurred to me that I knew the face of a man who was sitting below me in the body of the court.
"Hullo, Ryan, how are you?" he said.
I looked again, and recognized Denniston, who told me that he had come out from England on a trip, and had just strolled into the court out of idle curiosity. As he was talking to me, I looked through the door leading into the passage, and saw another face that I recognized.
"I wonder what has become of Charlie Fetherstonhaugh?" said Denniston.
"Look behind you. There he is," I replied, as Charlie Fetherstonhaugh himself came up, sound and hearty, having left the three men with their throats cut behind him in the hospital at Erzeroum. He too had dropped from the clouds, and strolled into the court by mere chance. So we had dinner together that evening, and great was the jollification thereat.
At our Stafford House Hospital in Erzeroum we had a continual stream of fresh cases, for the cavalry were continually making dashes against the Russians, and small affairs between outposts came off nearly every day; so that as fast as one lot of patients died or were discharged cured, a second lot were brought in. Cases of frostbite became very numerous, and many a time I had to lop off a man's feet or hands the flesh of which was simply rotting on the bones. Rations too were getting scarce, and as there was not enough food for every one the prisoners in the gaol were the first to suffer. The interior of that Erzeroum gaol was a sight not soon to be forgotten. Crowded together in a state of indescribable filth, the prisoners fought with the ferocity of wild beasts for the few handfuls of raw grain that the guard threw to them occasionally. Still, we continued to get beef tea and mutton broth for our wounded, and I made a point of going round the wards and administering it myself to those who needed it.
It was in connection with a matter of rations that I remember Edmund O'Donovan especially. O'Donovan was one of the wildest, most brilliant, and original geniuses who ever left Ireland to follow up the avocation of a war correspondent. He came to dinner with us one night, and his wit and versatility made a great impression upon me. The next time that I saw him was in response to an urgent request that I should call upon him and get him out of a scrape. His adventure was so thoroughly characteristic that I may be excused for narrating it.
O'Donovan, it seemed, with the warm-hearted generosity of his race, had invited half a dozen Circassian officers to dine with him, and had prepared an appetizing banquet for them. Among the dishes was an entrée so savoury, so succulent, so entirely satisfying to the palate of an epicure, that the Circassians, like the simple children of nature that they were, sent back their plates again and again for more. There was something new and strange yet delightful withal about that entrée. The meat was white and delicate and tender, the gravy was of a luscious brown, and in a fit of absence of mind the Circassian officers loaded up the whole cargo, while they laughed politely at O'Donovan's best Dublin stories, which were chiefly remarkable for having points where one never expected them.
Then O'Donovan expressed a hope that they had enjoyed the dinner, and the Circassians were most effusive in their thanks. Really they had never eaten anything like that entrée before, and would their host mind telling them the recipe?
"Begorra, I can tell ye that aisy enough," spluttered O'Donovan, with a mighty laugh. "Ye've been atin' the natest slip of a pig I've ever seen out of Connaught, and beautifully cooked he was too." Then he explained to them in Turkish more clearly, and these good Mussulmen burst into eruption. What a shindy there was at that dinner-table! The Circassians could not have been quicker if they had been at Donnybrook Fair, and they rushed at their host with the first weapons that came handy. O'Donovan did very well with the bottles for a minute or two, and afterwards with the leg of a chair; but they were too many for him, and when the table was upset and the lamps put out there was a fairly lively five minutes round the wreck of the dinner-table and of the empty dish that had once contained a sucking-pig à l'Irlandaise. The Moslem Circassians, full to repletion with the flesh of the accursed creature, fought under a disadvantage; and when O'Donovan's servants rushed in and took their master's part, the issue was no longer in doubt. Although the revolvers were going freely, only one man was hurt, and it appeared that O'Donovan had shot him in the arm. The affair created a great deal of excitement at the time, and the Circassians vowed vengeance for the insult; but we managed to pacify them eventually, and there were so many other things requiring attention that the trouble soon blew over.
This was not the only occasion that O'Donovan got into a scrape, for not long afterwards, while promenading on the roof of his house, the idea occurred to him that a little revolver practice might improve his aim. Drawing his six-shooter, he proceeded to blaze away at a dog that was gnawing a bone in the middle of the street; but like another famous character in fiction, he "missed the blue-bottle and floored the Mogul." In other words, a bullet which went wide of the dog found its billet in a fleshy part of the body of a very stout Turkish woman, who on receiving this flank attack fled in great disorder screaming loudly.
O'Donovan sent for me to help him out of this difficulty too, and we had to give the woman £10 to square her. The erratic marksman was then the war correspondent of the Daily News; but I never saw an account of this incident in his graphic descriptive sketches. He left Erzeroum in December, and afterwards, when the army of Hicks Pasha was cut to pieces in Egypt, O'Donovan met a soldier's death.
At this time we lost the services of Mr. Zohrab, the consul; for after the fall of Kars, Lord Derby, desiring to avoid any complications in the event of the Russians occupying Erzeroum, instructed the British consul to retire at once to Constantinople. Mr. Zohrab and his wife and sons accordingly left the town, much to our regret, for they had been very helpful to us. When he went, however, he handed over to us his house, which was fully provisioned, amply supplied with fuel, and provided with a well stocked cellar. We took possession at once, and after the poor kind of way in which we had been living our new quarters were most luxurious.
Although we personally were much better off than before, yet the condition of the bulk of the people in the town was getting steadily worse every day. Stores of every kind were getting scarce, and Kurd Ismael Pasha, who replaced Mukhtar Pasha as commander-in-chief when that officer was ordered to Constantinople, had a difficult task in administration. Towards the end of December it became necessary to relieve the town of a portion of the population, and an expedition consisting of four hundred men and two hundred women and children was ordered to start for Erzinghan, a town which was supposed to be five days' journey distant from Erzeroum.
This march rivalled in its horrors the march of the wounded men from Kars; for before the expedition had gone a day's journey from Erzeroum a fearful snowstorm swept down upon the hapless creatures, and when the miserable remnant had dragged themselves back to their starting-point it was found that of the two hundred women and children not a single soul remained. All died where they fell, including the wife of the colonel commanding the expedition, and were buried under the drifting heaps of snow that the wind piled high over the uncoffined remains. Of the soldiers who got back to Erzeroum the greater number perished from frostbite, dysentery, and exposure. It was an awful holocaust.
In spite of fever and dysentery, gunshot wounds in horrible variety and septic disease in every hospital, so strangely is the Anglo-Saxon mind constituted that we decided to "enjoy ourselves" at Christmas, although the Russians were practically knocking at our gates. My previous Christmas dinner consisted of a handful of maize cobs eaten in solitude on the ice-bound road to Orkhanieh. During the intervening year I had lived and worked and suffered much—and almost to my own astonishment I was still alive. So here at Erzeroum I proposed to have a Christmas festivity, and Pinkerton, Denniston, and Woods eagerly accepted the suggestion. We decided to invite all the European doctors in the town, and to give them a real English Christmas dinner, for which great preparations had to be made.
When we took over Mr. Zohrab's house, we also assumed a right title and interest in the services of two sturdy henchmen. One was old Tom Rennison, who had been dragoman for General Williams during the siege of Erzeroum thirty years before, and the other was an Armenian named Vachin. Tom Rennison, veteran campaigner as he was, had never seen mince-pies made, so to speak, under fire; and Vachin knew more about the preparation of pilaf than plum pudding. Consequently not only the arrangement of the menu, but the actual work of cooking it, devolved upon the medical staff; and I am sorry to say that, though by this time there were few things in surgery which we would not attempt, from disarticulation of a thumb to amputation of a thigh, nevertheless in the science of cooking we were painfully unlearned. Lister was an open book to us; but the dark sayings of Brillat-Savarin were as obscure as the Rig-Vedas.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself held a consultation over the plum pudding, which was intended to beget envy and jealousy in the hearts of the Austrian and Hungarian doctors, and to be a dazzling example of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon cooking over the unsubstantial kickshaws of continental cuisines. I noticed that Vachin, who was always an ill disposed fellow, looked undisguisedly contemptuous of our preparations, and that old Tom Rennison was obviously fluctuating between the extremes of hope and fear. It is not easy to recollect exactly what was in that pudding. Denniston had heard that suet was an ingredient of supreme importance, so the yellow fat was cut from the joint of beef which had been moving about the yard only two days before as the sirloin of Mr. Zohrab's best heifer. We found plenty of currants and raisins among the stores; but there was no candied peel, and the spices which had been imported from Teheran somehow smelt quite unlike the unconvincing substance that we remembered to have seen in our youth at the suburban grocer's. We had plenty of flour of course, and we mixed our chef-d'œuvre in a big brown pot. It was a viscous, œdematous mass, of the consistency of soft indiarubber, when we had done mixing it, and it resembled nothing so much as a bucketful of Zante currants which had fallen by accident into a glue-pot. The other fellows made some very discouraging remarks; but I tied up the ghastly mixture in half a clean sheet, and sat up all night on Christmas Eve boiling it in the iron pot.
On Christmas night we had a grand banquet, and about twenty other European doctors came in answer to our invitations to receive our hospitality. We explained to them at some length that we were going to give them a real English dinner, which was a treat that they had probably never enjoyed before, and very likely might never enjoy again.
Certainly the beef was a little tough, as the hapless heifer had only been sacrificed on the previous day, and then there was no horse-radish and very little gravy; but the geese were first-rate. Like everything else in Asia Minor, they were evidently of great antiquity. Probably they had seen the former siege of Erzeroum; but age, which weakens most other things, had strengthened their limbs and steeled their muscles, until to disintegrate the closely knitted tissues was a veritable feat of strength, and one swallowed a mouthful with the comfortable glow of satisfaction that follows the surmounting of a desperate difficulty. Of the mince-pies I cannot speak with certainty, for Woods had taken complete control over the manufacture of these delicious delicacies, and, much as I respected my colleague, I was suspicious of his ingredients. I can testify, however, from the simple experience of lifting one up from the dish that the mince-pies were solid and weighty additions to the menu. I waited with some anxiety for the pudding, and the happiness that the artist feels in a work completed came over me as I saw old Tom Rennison bearing in the dish containing the pudding, surrounded by leaping tongues of blue flame from the burning brandy. Up to this period the Hungarian doctors had been politely complimentary, and had accepted slabs of heifer's flesh as hard as boot leather and chunks of goose that would have made excellent ammunition for siege artillery as typical dishes of a correct English dinner. By dint of washing the food down with plenty of wine and many tumblers of brandy-and-water, they struggled along gamely through the first courses; but when they received their portions of the plum pudding they distinctly jibbed. With the flames playing round its charred, excoriated surface, it certainly had a diabolical look, and it held together with a glutinous consistency that for an appreciable number of seconds defied the attack even of a carving-knife. The Hungarian doctors viewed their plates with an alarmed suspicion that was too genuine to be concealed, and I must confess that when I got a spoonful of my masterpiece into my mouth the taste did not compensate in the least for the difficulty of detaching the fragment from the surrounding bed-rock. That was the first and last time that I cooked a plum pudding.
In spite of these little drawbacks, however, we all thoroughly enjoyed our Christmas dinner, and we made a fair hole in Mr. Zohrab's cellar, which was well stocked with wines and spirits and also with beer and porter. The dawn was coming up over the snow on the distant hills when we separated, laughing, singing, and wishing each other a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Within a fortnight nearly every one of us was down with typhus, and within a month more than half of our number were dead.
The first of the English doctors to catch the fever was poor Pinkerton. He was always terribly frightened of it, and used to carry quantities of camphor about in his pockets as a disinfectant; but with the epidemic raging as it was, any attempt at personal disinfection for a medical man attending the cases was practically hopeless. Pinkerton was always talking about his dread of getting typhus, and saying that if he caught it he would never get over it. This made Denniston and myself very anxious about him; for though he was a splendidly built, handsome fellow, with an excellent constitution, his apprehensions laid him open to attack more readily, and would certainly decrease his chance of recovery if the fever got its clutch upon him. Wrought up to a state of high nervous tension by continually moving among the sick and the dying, it was not to be wondered at that we attached significance to the veriest trifles, and both Denniston and myself recollected with dismay that every one of our patients who had had a presentiment of death up to that time had died.
On the last day of the old year Pinkerton became ill, and we put him to bed. He was very despondent, and I could see at once that he had an attack of the most malignant typhus. He was a very bad patient, and would take neither his medicine nor his nourishment without a great deal of trouble. Our number was now reduced to two, and Denniston and myself looked at each other every morning with questioning gaze. Fortunately Denniston had had malignant typhus in his student days at Glasgow, and was not likely to take it again, while I felt that if I could only pull through we might still be able to keep on the two hospitals. After three or four days Pinkerton fell into a semi-comatose condition, from which he never emerged, but lay in bed moaning feebly, and talking incoherently at intervals of fighting and of operations and of places and people whose names were unfamiliar to me.
How clearly those dreadful days come back! We had the ever present, bitter, numbing cold, and the ceaseless work in the hospital as one passed from bed to bed, from the moaning wounded to the poor wretches who were being consumed by the fires of fever, and thence to the ghastly mutilated creatures who had lost hands, feet, ears, and even noses by frostbite. Then there was in addition the anxiety about Pinkerton, and the fear that one or both of us two survivors would succumb to the strain, and thus leave the bulk of the sick and wounded without medical succour. In addition to it all was the nervous strain of waiting for the expected Russian attack, which would have been gladly welcomed as a relief from the intolerable tension.
During these early days of January, 1878, the mortality in Erzeroum was something appalling. Out of a total number of about seventeen thousand troops in the town, there were on one day no fewer than three hundred and two deaths, and the daily death-rate frequently rose to two hundred! The weak, emaciated survivors had hardly strength left to dig graves for their dead comrades in the hard and frozen ground. At last they gave up even the pretence of digging, and the bodies were simply carted out about a mile from the main thoroughfares of the town, and left in the snow just inside the city walls.