Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles

by Archibald Forbes

After the crossing of the Danube in the last days of June the Russian army spread out into the adjacent Bulgarian country like a fan. Krüdener went west to subdue Nicopolis, and later to come to grief at Plevna. Gourko rode away over the Balkans, through the Hankioj Pass, on that adventurous expedition which sanguine people expected to end at Adrianople. The Twelfth Corps forged away slowly in the easterly direction, toward the Danubian fortress of Rustchuk, the keypoint of the Turkish quadrilateral in Bulgaria, and its advance I accompanied over the low rolling country, towards the Jantra, and later athwart the more broken terrain between the Jantra and the Lom. It was a sort of holiday stroll for Driesen’s cavalry division, which leisurely pioneered the way for the force that later came to be known as “the Army of the Cesarewitch.” We were received with offerings of corn, oil, and wine by the Conscript Fathers of Biela, and tarried in that pleasant rus in urbe for a couple of days. Then after a while we dawdled on, past the copses of Monastir and the grain-clad slopes of Obertenik, until well on into July we pitched camp on a long swell falling down to the Danube at Pirgos, with Rustchuk away in front of us, some ten miles off. We were far enough forward, pending the coming up of supports; so we threw out pickets to the front and flanks, and made ourselves as comfortable as might be in the bright sunshine tempered by cool breezes blowing down from the Balkans.

Baron Driesen was an active man, and made work for himself. He was always leading reconnaissances into the country along and across the Lom, in the course of which he had the occasional amusement of a skirmish. I used to accompany him on those expeditions, just to keep myself and my horses in exercise; they were quite unimportant from my professional point of view, and a dozen of them would not have been worth the cost of a five-line telegram. My comrade Villiers preferred to go sketching in the glens with dear old General Arnoldi, one of the brigade commanders, the simplest, quaintest, most lovable of old gentlemen, and I should think the worst cavalry brigade commander to be found even in the Russian Army. The other brigade chief, Staël von Holstein, read and wrote all day in the shade under the wide fly of his pretty striped tent, coming over to us in the evening to smoke a cigarette, drink a tumbler of tea, and relieve our ennui with his pleasant gossip about men, women, and things.

It was not my affair, but I confess I did not greatly relish the position we occupied. The division, with its batteries of horse artillery, was out here all by itself, with no infantry within several miles, both its flanks bare, overlapped by the Turks on its right, its left utterly in the air, and its line of retreat by no means safe. But while the Russians treated those conditions with a fine indifference, the Turks did not display any enterprise. A few weeks later they woke up, it is true; and then the Russians had to fall back out of the unsafe angle, with considerable losses, and not without confusion; but by that time I was elsewhere, and in watching the abortive efforts to drive Osman Pasha out of Plevna had ceased to feel a vivid interest in the fortunes of the Army of the Lom.

I must go a little more into detail as to the position of Driesen’s cavalry division in those July days of 1877, and as to the country in its vicinity, because I wish to describe a risky little experience that happened to me then, to follow the narrative of which this minuteness is requisite.

I have already mentioned that our camp was on a long swell running inland at about right angles from the Danube. Before us, as we looked out from the front of the camp in the direction of Rustchuk, there ran parallel to our position a long valley—deep, but with smooth bottom and sides—on which were fields of grain that had been cut and set up into stooks. Over against us, on the farther side of this valley, rose a ridge very similar in formation to our own, but having its crest clothed with woods, and on its slope facing us were clumps of trees interspersed among the corn-fields. The valley between the two ridges was for the time neutral ground. The Turks held the wooded ridge confronting us, and our fore-post line ran along in our front about half-way down the slope of our ridge as it trended down into the intervening valley.

One bright warm afternoon our friends the enemy brought forward a couple of batteries of field-guns, and from a position in front of the wood which crested their ridge opened fire against our camp. The range was a long one, but the Turks had Krupp guns, and their shells came lobbing across the valley and occasionally pitched among the tents. The Russians, who have a great propensity to lazy idleness when the weather is warm, apparently could not be bothered to reply to this fire for quite a while; but at length, about four o’clock, I saw their gunners busy among the field-guns that were ranged in position along the front of the camp.

Just then I met Baron Driesen, who told me that he had remained quiet thus long because of a little scheme he had adopted to surprise and perhaps to cut off the Turkish guns opposite us there. Some two hours earlier, when he first noticed the guns being brought up into position, he had sent off Holstein with the light cavalry regiment of his brigade—the “Gray Hussars” we used to call them, from the colour of their horses—away to our right, with orders, if practicable, to cross the valley higher up out of sight of the Turks, and, getting on to the slope of their ridge, work northward through the clumps of trees, till, if they had the luck to get so far, within charging distance of the left flank of the Turkish batteries, when the Russian troopers were to do their best to capture the guns.

I am an old cavalry-man, and was naturally always eager to be with the mounted arm on any duty assigned to it; and I rather made a grievance of it to the Baron that he had not let me know of the despatch of Holstein and his Grays, that I might have gone along with them. Driesen was the best-tempered man in the world. “Why,” said he, “standing here, you’ve got the whole panorama under your eye, and if they have the luck to get up and do anything you can see their work a great deal better, and, what is more, a great deal more safely, than if you were over there with them, blinded by dust and smoke.” But, nevertheless, I was only half-content.

The Russian guns opened presently, and then there was an hour or two of reprisal at long bowls, and nothing else. The Russians lost a horse or two, and one unfortunate fellow was cut in two back in the camp, but the futile powder-burning was getting very tedious. All at once, however, I noticed some horsemen showing little glimpses of themselves out of a long clump of trees a few hundred yards below, and on the left of the Turkish batteries.

“Look, Baron!” cried I, “there are Holstein’s cavalry fellows, sure enough. They’ve worked round beautifully—quite artistically—and now they are gathering in that clump, getting ready for their dash at the guns!”