All day on that terrible 20th of July I worked in the Bulgarian schoolhouse among the wounded men, and all day the arabas kept arriving with fresh loads, until there was absolutely no place left in which to lay the sufferers. In all my surgical experience I have never known men to exhibit such fortitude under intense agony as these Turkish soldiers, nor have I ever met patients who recovered from such terrible injuries in the remarkable way that these men did. They were magnificent material for a surgeon to work on—men of splendid physique, unimpaired by intemperance or any excesses. Occasionally one found isolated cases of intemperance among the higher officers in the Turkish army; but I never saw a private soldier under the influence of liquor during the whole time that I was in the country. There were many of these men whose lives I could have saved if I could have persuaded them to take stimulants; but it was impossible to get them to touch alcohol, even as medicine. The principles of their religion forbid the use of alcohol, and the humble Turk clings so tenaciously to his religion that he would rather meet death itself than violate its precepts. On account of another remarkable religious prejudice many of the men who came under my hands absolutely refused to submit to amputations, believing that the loss of a limb would prevent them from entering paradise. Owing to this curious prejudice many of my patients lost their lives.
The booming of the artillery was soon varied by the sharp crackle of the rifles, which indicated that the infantry fusillade was commencing in earnest, and men began to come in who were wounded by the heavy conical bullets from the Berdan rifles, with which a large proportion of the Russian forces were armed. This rifle carried a bullet with a very high velocity; and several cases came under my notice which illustrated its destructive power. The Berdan rifle-bullet, however, often drilled a clean hole right through a man, thus simplifying the surgical treatment; while the older Krenke rifle, with which the bulk of the Russians were armed, inflicted a much larger wound, and not infrequently left the bullet embedded in the body.
Among the others whom I attended that morning was a splendid young Turk who had been shot through the head. The Berdan conical bullet pierced the left side of the skull about an inch and a half below the crown, and passed out in a straight line through the other side, leaving two holes, one at each side of the fez which the man was wearing. It bored a hole clean through the upper portion of the brain; but the sufferer, though he was weak from loss of blood, was perfectly rational. I put a syringe into the orifice, and cleaned the lacerated portion of the brain with a solution of carbolic, afterwards dressing the skull with an antiseptic pad and bandages. The man was put into the hospital, where he remained for about six weeks, and at the end of that time he was discharged cured. He went back to his regiment, and I never saw him again.
In one of the arabas which discharged its load at the hospital door was a wounded sergeant. The poor fellow had had both his eyes taken out by a bullet, and was in great agony. We took him in and treated him, keeping him in the hospital till he recovered. Some weeks afterwards we discharged him cured, but sightless, and he went down to Sofia.
Many men were shot right through the chest, of whom nearly all died. In cases where we could not readily locate the bullet we did not waste time looking for it, and several men who recovered from their wounds went back to the ranks with an ounce of Russian lead hidden somewhere in their bodies. Occasionally a bullet would take a most erratic course. One man whom I attended had been shot in the back of the neck, and the bullet travelled along his shoulder and down his arm just under the skin. I took it out at the wrist.
A peculiar instance came under my notice of the extraordinary vitality which a human being sometimes displays. A couple of men brought in a young Circassian and laid him on the floor, all the beds in the hospital being already occupied. He was deathly pale, and when I went to him I found that he had a terrible wound in the chest. At first I thought that he had been struck by a whole shell; but I found on examining him that a rifle-bullet had struck his cartridge case which was strapped across his chest, and exploded one or more of the cartridges. The explosion had blown away a great portion of the chest, and exposed the heart, which I could see beating. I plugged the cavity as well as I could, and he lived for four or five days in the hospital, perfectly conscious all the while, and eager for news of the fighting. I think it was on the fifth day after his admission that I was examining the wound, when I found the brass butt of a cartridge embedded in the muscles of the heart. I pulled it out, and dressed the wound again; but the shock was too severe, and the man died soon afterwards.
We had no skilled attendants attached to the hospital, and no one to do the dressing but a few soldiers who had been told off for the purpose. Blood was everywhere; and as I went my rounds as quickly as possible among the moaning sufferers, I had an attendant carrying my box of instruments, a basin of water, and a supply of bandages after me. On all sides I heard the piteous moan, "Verbana su, effendi," "Verbana su, hakim bashi," meaning, "Give me a drink of water, doctor"; and fortunately we were able at least to assuage the intolerable thirst which afflicts men when the moisture of the body has been depleted by great loss of blood. All the cases which required operations were put aside, and left for the following day, as it was necessary, in the hurry of endeavouring to over-take the work, to deal with the larger number of less serious cases first. Whenever I saw that a case was hopeless, and that the man was sure to die, I simply made him as comfortable as I could on the floor, gave him a drink of water, and left him there.
I remained in the hospital until three o'clock in the afternoon, and during the whole of that time the carts were jolting over the stones bringing us in fresh cases. I never stopped for a moment whipping out bullets, sewing up wounds, cleaning wounds, and putting up fractured limbs in splints. Sometimes when the carts came in I did not know which of the men were alive and which were dead, the living and the dead were lying so closely one on the top of the other.
At three o'clock Hassib Bey, the principal medical officer, sent a message for me, ordering me to go to another place which had been turned into a temporary hospital. It was an isolated building, about a quarter of a mile away from the schoolhouse, and was on the other side of the Tutchenitza. The building had been a private house, and here I found about a hundred wounded men, many of them officers, who had been lying there helplessly since early in the morning, with no attendance except the small services which two jarra bashis were able to afford.