A Turkish colonel shot through both jaws was my first patient. The bullet had cut through the base of the tongue, and the poor fellow was unable to speak. His mouth was wide open, and blood was issuing from it. I picked away the broken pieces of bone, put a bandage round the jaw to support it, and, having made the colonel as comfortable as I could, I went on to his brother officers. All the rest of that day I worked by myself, with only the two jarra bashis to assist me, among the wounded men, and when it grew dark I went on with the minor operations by the light of four candles stuck on bayonets. At eleven o'clock that night I dragged myself off to bed.
It was a beautiful summer night, with moon and stars shining, as I walked back to my quarters utterly fagged out with that tremendous day's work. A couple of miles away to the north I could see the long ridge of the Janik Bair shining in the moonlight. More than a thousand Turks and more than one thousand two hundred Russians lay stretched on the other side of the hill, and along the line of the fighting from Bukova on the left to Grivitza on the right.[2] All was silent now, but the hills were not deserted yet, for the burial parties were hard at work, and the Circassians, ever on the look out for plunder, were gathering in the dreadful harvest of the battle-field.
I slept soundly till six o'clock in the morning, and then went back to the house where the wounded officers had been brought. There were about a hundred wounded men there altogether; and as we had no beds to put them in, we had to lay them on the floor pillowed on their own great-coats. There were plenty of provisions in the town, and I had supplies of broth, beef-tea, and milk brought up for the patients from the central depot. Still, in spite of everything that we could do, it was an experience never to be forgotten. As one moved amongst them one heard piteous moans on every side, coming from forms which in some cases could scarcely be recognized as human, so terribly had the shrapnel done its work. Those who believed that they were dying were saying their prayers out loud, calling upon Allah to receive them into paradise; and here and there an officer in the delirium of fever was fighting the battle over again, sitting up in his blood-clotted, shot-riddled uniform, and calling upon his men to follow him, until he fell back breathless and exhausted. A good many of them had died in the night while I was away, and I told off a couple of men to bury them at once.
While I was going round the house, I found that we had two young Russian soldiers there among our own people, and I gave them as much attention as I could. One was a fair-haired young fellow, quite a lad. His case was hopeless from the first, for he had been shot through the lungs, and he died that day without being able to leave any message. The other had his leg from the knee downwards shattered by a shell, and he lived for about a fortnight.
Osman Pasha had made arrangements to send all the wounded away to Sofia, and nearly all of those whom I attended were placed in waggons and sent down viâ Orkhanieh. Many of them, however, as might be expected, died on the way, and the road could have easily been traced by the dead bodies.
I requisitioned some beds for my hospital; and when I had got all the wounded men dressed and fed, I thought that my day's work was finished. Just as I was going out for a short rest, however, an orderly came and told me that a number of wounded men were lying in a Turkish mosque without any help at all, and asked me to go to them. I found a most beautiful little mosque nestling down in a grove of trees on a slope of ground to the west side of the Tutchenitza, and, mounting the half-dozen steps which formed the approach to the main entrance, I looked inside.
It was indeed a hideous sight. The square floor of the mosque was covered with dead and wounded men, who had been placed there on the day before, and apparently forgotten. There were about eighty of them altogether, and the first thing that we had to do was to separate the living from the dead, which was not an easy task, as the dead were lying across the living and the living across the dead. We took out twenty-seven dead men first, and found that in some cases a man with faint signs of life in him had been lying all night, half suffocated by his own blood and by the inert mass of a dead comrade lying across him. The walls, which were whitewashed, were plentifully bespattered with blood, and soon I was a shocking spectacle myself.