THE BULGARIAN HORRORS
The Turks undertook to prevent this in their usual fashion. Irregular troops were sent into Christian Bulgaria with orders to kill all they met. It was an order to the Mohammedan taste. The defenseless villages of Bulgaria were entered and their inhabitants slaughtered in cold blood, till thousands of men, women, and children had been slain.
When tidings of these atrocities reached Europe the nations were filled with horror. The Sultan made smooth excuses, and diplomacy sought to settle the affair, but it became evident that a massacre so terrible as this could not be condoned so easily. Disraeli, then prime minister of Great Britain, sought to minimize these reports so as to avert a great war in which England might be plunged. But Gladstone, at that time in retirement, arose, and by his pamphlet on the “Bulgarian Horrors” aroused a fierce public sentiment in England. His denunciation rang out like a trumpet-call. “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner—by carrying off themselves,” he wrote. “Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.”
He followed up this pamphlet by a series of speeches, delivered to great meetings and to the House of Commons, with which for four years he sought, as he expressed it, “night and day to counterwork the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield.” He succeeded; England was prevented by his eloquence from actively resisting Russia; and he excited the fury of the war party to such an extent that at one time it was not safe for him to appear in the streets of London.
Hostilities were soon proclaimed. The Russians, of the same race and religious sect as the Bulgarians, were excited beyond control, and in April 1877, Alexander II declared war against Turkey. The outrages of the Turks had been so flagrant that no allies came to their aid, while the rottenness of their empire was shown by the rapid advance of the Russian armies. They crossed the Danube in June. In a month later, they had occupied the principal passes of the Balkan mountains and were in position to descend on the broad plain that led to Constantinople. But at this point in their career they met with a serious check. Osman Pasha, the single Turkish commander of ability that the war developed, occupied the town of Plevna with such forces as he could gather, fortified it as strongly as possible, and from its walls defied the Russians.