Once I went with two others by boat to a small island on the Danube, where there were numbers of wild duck. We got to work upon them in great style, and soon had a full bag; but when we were in the middle of the fun, half a squadron of Roumanian cavalry came galloping down to the opposite bank to see what the firing was about. It would not have taken much at that moment to provoke a conflict.
CHAPTER IV.
FROM WIDDIN TO PLEVNA.
Declaration of War with Russia—An Ominous Silence—The First Shot—An Interrupted Luncheon—Under Fire at last—Disappearance of the Inhabitants—A Move Underground—Running the Gauntlet—Blowing up a Gunboat—Our Hospital shelled—Killing the Wounded—Operations under Fire—A Terrible Coincidence—How a Turkish Mother died—Some Marvellous Escapes—Circassians on a Raiding Expedition—Cattle-lifting on a Grand Scale—A Long Bombardment—Insignificant Losses—Osman Pasha in the Batteries—Rewarding a Good Shot—Circassian Peccadilloes—Osman Pasha's Plans—He is baffled by Red Tape—A Fatal Delay—Good-bye to the Kyrchehir—Marching out from Widdin—A Picturesque Bivouac—False Alarms—A Forced March—How the Russian Army was placed—Fall of Nicopolis—A Race to the Balkans—Sleeping in a Tomb—Pushing on to Plevna—A Terrible Night—Lost in the Bush—Many Cases of Sunstroke—Goose for Dinner—I flesh my Maiden Sword—A Record March—We cross the Vid at last—Arrival at Plevna.
Although we knew that war was coming, still the actual declaration fell with the suddenness of a bombshell. On April 25 I had done my hospital work, and was walking down the street, when I noticed a great commotion, and saw groups of people talking excitedly together and orderlies galloping about in all directions. Presently Tallat Bey, a nephew of Osman Pasha and one of the headquarters staff, came cantering down the street. I stopped him to ask what all the excitement was about, and he told me that war had been declared by Russia on the previous day. A regular hum pervaded Widdin all that day, as the people repeated to one another the ominous news that Turkey would have to fight once more for her very life. We had been arranging all our ambulance work beforehand; and old Hassib Bey undertook, in compliance with my request, that I should be attached to the first troops that took the field.
But strangely enough, though war had been declared, and though we could see the Roumanian troops busily engaged in completing the fortification of Kalafat, several days went by without a shot being fired from either the Widdin or Kalafat batteries, and we were left looking at each other in grim expectation and suspense.
I remember well the first time that I ever heard a shot fired in war. I was sitting in my little Bulgarian hotel on the bank of the river with Colonel Stracey, who afterwards commanded the Scots Guards. He had been inspecting the Russian army at Kischeneff, and between the time that he left them and his arrival at Widdin war was declared. When he came to the hotel where I was staying, I was delighted to see him, since he was the first Englishman, apart from the war correspondents, the notorious Dr. Black, and my friend Jack, the engineer of the Government mill, whom I had met in the town. We were having lunch together, when we heard a loud "boom" apparently close at hand, followed almost immediately by the distant roar of a heavy gun; and before we could realize what was happening, a shell struck the end of the hotel and crashed through two rooms, bringing bricks and plaster down in all directions with clouds of dust. The bombardment from Kalafat had begun at last, provoked by a shot from a Turkish gunboat on the river; and within a few minutes the shells were shrieking over us, the women were screaming, and valorous old Turks were running out of their houses armed with rusty flintlocks or anything in the shape of a weapon that they could get hold of. Now and then a shell came crashing into the hotel; and as it stood in an isolated position on the bank of the river affording a capital target for the enemy's fire, it soon became too hot a corner to remain in. So it was shut up, and Stracey and I, both of whom were then under fire for the first time, moved farther back into the town, where I had secured a house for myself on the previous day in anticipation of some such trouble. The firing went on for about three hours, and all the women in the town were of course terribly frightened, and were rushing about shrieking and weeping, not knowing what to do. It was curious to see the behaviour of the different nationalities in the hour of danger. Most of the Spanish women gathered together under the walls of the fortress, where they erected a roof of mats with the fortress wall as a support. Here they were perfectly safe from the Roumanian shells, which either struck the wall on the outside or else passed over it, dropping much farther in the natural course of their trajectory. The Turkish women huddled together in two large alcoves in the wall of the archway leading into the fortress, refuges which were almost like dungeons hewn out of the solid masonry, and which were absolutely safe from projectiles. When the firing was over I went to the hospital, and found that four or five people had been wounded. A Spanish boy had lost his arm, and a Turkish woman had been killed by a shell bursting in her room. One unpleasant result of the bombardment was that Stracey and I had nothing to eat all night, as all the butchers and bakers in Widdin were down in their cellars, and no amount of money would induce them to come out. They put their heads above-ground next day, cautiously emerging like rabbits from their burrows, but always went back at night.
That evening when I was dozing off to sleep there was a terrific crash of artillery, the vibration of the firing breaking every window of the house; and as it was quickly replied to by the batteries of Kalafat, I jumped into my clothes, and rushed out to find the cause of this sudden eruption of hostilities. It was plain enough. A Roumanian vessel loaded with troops was running the gauntlet down the river in front of Widdin; and as she steamed past in the night on the far side of the long island opposite the town, the smoke of her funnel betrayed her, and the earth-shaking roar of the forty heavy siege-guns in the Widdin batteries told that the attempt was discovered. Only the vessel's smoke-stack could be seen over the island by the sparks flying upwards in the dark, and through this phantasmal target the big shells hissed and shrieked in vain, bursting in mid-air and burying the fragments in Roumanian soil across the river. The batteries at Kalafat took up the tale at once, and for a few hours we had a lively time of it. It was the adverse fortune of war for the Roumanian vessel; for after she had dodged the storm of shells from our siege-guns and got safely out of range, she was blown up by a Turkish monitor lower down the river, and every soul on board perished.
On June 1 I was detailed for duty in the main hospital, which was just then receiving an unusual amount of attention from the Kalafat batteries. Unfortunately for the wounded, this hospital was situated a few hundred yards from one of our batteries; and while the Roumanians were finding the range for this battery, a good number of their shells, which had too much elevation, dropped on the hospital and on the surrounding houses. I was sitting in my room in the hospital one day when a shell burst with an awful crash in the middle of a ward full of sick and wounded men. It struck the lattice of a window, and at once exploded. When I rushed in, the ward was full of dust and smoke, out of which came terrible screams and cries. Four of the patients had been killed on the spot, and seven others had been wounded. One man, who was delirious from malarial fever, had his side ripped open from hip to shoulder by a fragment of the shell. He was still alive, but wildly delirious. Another had his arm fearfully mangled, and I took it off at the shoulder there and then. The only nurses that I had were the men supplied by the different regiments for hospital duty. One of them, a stalwart private from my old regiment the Kyrchehir, was among the four who were killed by the shell. A great outcry was made outside Turkey about the Roumanians violating the Convention of Geneva and the principles of humanity by firing on the hospital; but my own opinion is that they could not avoid hitting it in the position which it occupied, and that it should never have been placed there at all.