When the men were dismissed from this mighty church parade, they would scamper off like so many schoolboys, and indulge in all kinds of games with the keen joy of living, and the unblunted faculties of sensation which are seldom found in the alcohol-drinkers of other nations. Wrestling was a favourite pastime with the men; and it was no uncommon sight to see five thousand spectators gathered in a huge ring, in the centre of which picked competitors, stripped to the waist, engaged each other in a catch-as-catch-can struggle. Hassan Labri Pasha, one of the principal officers in the camp, was an enthusiast in the sport of wrestling, and used to get up great tournaments in which the men wrestled each other for prizes of tobacco and other inexpensive little luxuries.
After three weeks of this life in camp, I was ordered back to Widdin again, and took up my quarters at the little Bulgarian hotel on the bank of the Danube where I had been before. Things were looking very serious at this time; and though war was not actually declared by Russia until April 24, 1877, still it was quite certain long before this date that Roumania would espouse the Russian cause; and when the Russian army which had been quartered on the Pruth entered Roumanian territory, the Government of the Porte communicated with the Roumanian Government, intimating that they construed the act of Roumania in allowing Russian troops to cross her frontier as an act of hostility towards Turkey.
About a week before the declaration of war, two Roumanian officers came down the Danube from Kalafat, and landed at my hotel, where they were stopped and told that they could go no farther. One of them was a Captain Giorgione, whom I met and asked to dine with me before he went back to Kalafat. He accepted my invitation, and after a long and pleasant conversation about the general situation and the prospects of war he gave me a cordial invitation to go across the river to Kalafat and pay him a visit in his quarters. As hostilities were expected to break out at any moment, no one was allowed to cross the Danube from our side without a special permit from Osman Pasha; and as there was no probability that he would grant me the necessary permission, I determined to make the trip on my own account. Possibly this was an indiscretion on my part; but indiscretions are apt to be the most enjoyable things in life, and I was getting tired of the humdrum routine of the camp. I had my English passport with me, which ensured my safe conduct until the actual declaration of hostilities; and armed with this precious document, I got one of my colleagues to act as locum tenens during my temporary absence from my practice, and hired a boat and a crew of boatmen to take me over the river, which at this point is nearly a mile wide, and flows with a current of extraordinary velocity. I dressed myself in a suit of mufti, but had no hat, and must have presented rather a piebald appearance with a Turkish fez surmounting a suit of English tweed. The Roumanian customs officers stared at me pretty hard, but they franked me through on my English passport, and I went into Kalafat, leaving my boatmen on the Roumanian side of the river to bring me back the same night.
I strolled into a café in Kalafat, which was then a town of about three thousand people; and the experience of living again in the European fashion, eating at a table, sitting on a chair, and seeing men in ordinary coats and trousers and hard black hats, struck me with all the charm of the unexpected. I felt the sensation of a Robinson Crusoe transplanted suddenly from his desert island and set down in the Hôtel Bristol.
Almost the first person that I met after I had finished breakfast was my friend Captain Giorgione, who expressed his delight at seeing me, and took me off at once to introduce me to the general commanding the division, after which I went to the captain's quarters in a house in the town. Most of the ordinary residents of Kalafat had already left the place, fearing that the bombardment of the town by the Widdin batteries was imminent, and the houses were filled with Roumanian officers and men. I lunched with Captain Giorgione and his brother officers, many of whom spoke German, and evinced a capacity for hearing news which was hardly disinterested. However, they were excessively polite, and in the afternoon we strolled on the promenade, and listened to the strains of an excellent military band.
As evening drew in my conscience began to trouble me, and I had the qualms of a schoolboy who has broken bounds, thinking of Osman Pasha and the remarks that he would be likely to make if he found out where I was. However, my newly found friends would not hear of my leaving them that day, and insisted upon my staying to dinner, at which I was given the seat of honour next to the general. What a capital dinner that was! Perhaps I enjoyed it all the more from the little circumstance that Osman Pasha might have me shot as soon as I got back. The Roumanian band played English airs in my honour, and the officers kept my glass always filled with Pommery. By the time we had reached the walnuts I found myself developing a surprising talent for mendacity, and the more questions that my polite hosts asked me the more astonishing grew my answering taradiddles. Of course they tried to pump me as to the number and disposition of the Turkish troops, and of course, guileless youth that I was, I lied wholesale. Even when I had put down the troops in Widdin at a hundred thousand men and expanded the artillery to four hundred guns, I was almost as astonished at my own moderation as they were at the magnitude of the force which Turkey had already mobilized in Widdin. One of the Roumanian surgeons who was at that dinner was green with envy when he discovered that I ranked as a major in the Turkish army while he was graded as a lieutenant. We had a very merry night of it, and I hope that all the fibs I told will not be remembered against me. Then at daybreak I made my way to the river, found my boatmen, and was back by six o'clock at my hotel with no one a bit the wiser for my escapade.
I met some interesting men at Widdin just before the war, notably a splendid young fellow named Frank Power—who, by the way, was a nephew of the late Sir Peter Lalor, once speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and long ago a picturesque figure in the fight at the Eureka Stockade near Ballarat. Frank Power was a young Irishman, who had joined the Austrian military service, but afterwards was sent up to Widdin to act as war correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. He lived with me; and I found him a most delightful companion, full of romance, and generously endowed with the love of adventure, and the enthusiasm, fire, and wit which are characteristic of the best Irishmen. He was a splendid rider and keen all-round sportsman, had read widely if not deeply, and with the mercurial temperament of the adventurer he combined more than a trace of the artist nature. He had the happiest knack of producing charming sketches in black-and-white or water-colours of bits of picturesque Bulgarian peasant life, groups of Turkish soldiery, or glimpses of the iris-spangled country that was soon to be coloured in a deeper dye. Poor Power was almost heart-broken when they sent up Nicholas Leader from Constantinople to replace him as the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He returned to Vienna, and thence to Dublin, where he resumed his old journalistic life for a time. But to such a man as Power a life of comparative inactivity was impossible; and when the troubles broke out in the Soudan, he soon found his way over there, and eventually reached Khartoum, where General Gordon appointed him British consul. Shortly before the fall of Khartoum, Gordon sent him down the Nile in a steamer with Colonel Stewart and an Arab escort to take despatches to the force advancing to the relief of Khartoum. However, before the steamer had got far the smouldering fires of disaffection among the natives on board broke into flame, and they succeeded in running the steamer aground. Lured by the friendly demonstrations of the Arabs on the shore, Colonel Stewart and Frank Power went ashore with their escort while efforts were being made to lighten the steamer and float her off again. The full details of what followed will never be known with certainty; but news of a massacre reached the British column eventually, and the bearers of the despatches were among the missing. Those who are familiar with Dervish methods may picture for themselves the sudden rush of bloodthirsty fanatics, the desperate hand-to-hand combat, and the deaths of Colonel Stewart and of my gallant young comrade when they fell pierced by Arab lances on the scorched and dreadful desert that lies along the banks of the Nile from Wady Halfa to Khartoum.
Nicholas Leader, who was sent up from Constantinople to take Frank Power's place in Widdin, had already had an adventurous career, and had smelt powder in many lands. After seeing service with the British troops in Canada, he resigned on the declaration of war by France upon Germany in 1870, and took service with the French arms. He was attached to the ill fated army of Bourbaki, and was interned with other prisoners of war in Switzerland. Afterwards, when the Carlist insurrection broke out in Spain, he joined the standard of Don Carlos, and took part in the fierce guerilla warfare which the Carlists waged against the Spanish Government. The war correspondents of those fighting days in Spain were as dare-devil a crew as ever lived; and Leader described to me with many a laugh the circumstances under which he first met Edmund O'Donovan, another Irishman, as gay and reckless as himself. Leader was in command of a small fort in the north of Spain during the height of the insurrection, when one day he espied a strange figure clad in a long, dilapidated overcoat approaching the walls. The Spanish sentries yelled to the suspicious visitor to halt; and as he took no notice of them, they fired on him, and the bullets kicked up the dust all round the stranger. The only result, however, was that he increased his pace, and came on at the double until he reached the walls off the fort amid a rain of bullets. "Cease firing, ye blackguards!" he shouted in the simple dialect of Southern Cork. "I'm Edmund O'Donovan, and how the blazes can I get in unless you open the gate!" Leader was summoned to interpret the strange language of the foreigner, and he let him in. Thus it was that Edmund O'Donovan, who was attached to the Government troops, walked alone into the enemy's fortress.
Nicholas Leader, after all his wanderings, found a grave in Turkish soil; for after a few weeks in Widdin, he joined the army of Suleiman Pasha at the Shipka Pass, and died there of fever.
About the time that Leader left Widdin the town was in a state of suppressed excitement, for every one knew that the declaration of war was imminent, and the slightest incident was sufficient to cause a demonstration.