I put on a soldier to go round with a bucket and pannikin to assuage the fiery thirst of the poor wretches, and then I set to work extracting bullets and sewing up wounds and washing them as fast as I could, with a soldier to help in the dressing. I undertook no big operations simply because I had not time. It was a race for life with many of the men; and while there were cases there which would have required at least an hour to deal with properly, the most that I could spare was ten minutes.
By July 22 all the wounded that could travel had been sent to Sofia, and we had about two hundred of the graver cases left, most of them being cases requiring serious operations. We selected a convenient building on the banks of the Tutchenitza, right under the shadow of a mosque, and there we set up operating tables under the trees in the open air. It was strange every day to see a flock of white doves circling round the minaret of the mosque, and every evening at sunset to watch the old Mussulman priest as he climbed the tower and solemnly invited the faithful to prayer.
CHAPTER VI.
THE INTERVAL BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND BATTLES.
Sending away the Wounded—Osman Effendi—We perform Operations—Amputating Fingers—A Warning to Malingerers—Trial and Execution—Discipline in the Town—Round the Bazaars after the Battle—Some Pathetic Souvenirs—The Punishment of Looters—Circassian and Bulgarian—A Cold-blooded Murder—The Work of Fortification—Out with the Burial Parties—A Walk over the Battle-field—Fresh Reinforcements arrive—The Lovtcha Expedition—Rifaat Pasha's Success—My Quarters near the Hospital—I have a Flitting—Arrival of Olivier Pain—A Pretty Bulgarian Girl—Limitations of a Vocabulary—Hospital Routine—Soldier Nurses.
We sent away about eight hundred of the wounded to Sofia within a few days after the first battle; and of those who remained behind many died, and the remainder resolved themselves into cases for simple operations. Amputation of the arm or leg was necessary in many instances, and whenever the sufferer would permit it this was carried out. With the large medical staff attached to the army, the work ought to have been very easy; but as a matter of fact many of the surgeons could not or would not undertake any important operation, and in the few instances when they did muster up courage to lop off an arm or a limb the spectacle was not an edifying one. Almost all the operations were performed either by Osman Effendi, a Circassian, who was a really brilliant surgeon and a capable anatomist who had learnt his profession in Paris, or by myself. Both of us were very young and inexperienced; but in spite of these drawbacks it is not too much to say that we saved many lives which would otherwise have been lost. The foreign doctors seemed to lose their heads in an emergency; and it was not an uncommon thing for Osman Effendi or myself to find some poor unfortunate wretch, who had been smashed up by a shell or drilled through by a Berdan bullet, absolutely rotting away in a hospital ward simply because the surgeon in charge would not operate. Whenever we made a discovery of this kind, we used to bring the patient out to the operating table under the willow tree, and do the best we could for him under the circumstances; but it cannot be denied that, owing to our lack of experience, we often made serious mistakes. I will candidly confess that if I had possessed my present knowledge at that time, and if I had had command of all the best appliances, I could have saved many lives which unfortunately flickered out in that shady little grove on the banks of the Tutchenitza.
In addition to the grave cases which involved the removal of an arm or leg, we had a large number of minor injuries to attend to, especially wounds in the hand, which were remarkably frequent. When the troops were in the act of firing, their fingers and hands were naturally exposed; and though later on, when the firing was mainly done from behind entrenchments, finger wounds became far more frequent, still we had a good many of them even after the first battle.
A splendid lesson in stoical fortitude was afforded by those fellows, who tendered their maimed hands for operation without the slightest flinching. The stump of a willow tree which had been cut down stood near the bank of the stream, and here I was accustomed to take my seat, after providing myself with a basin of water from the stream and a sharp knife. I put a little carbolic in the water, and with these simple preparations I was ready for my patients, who sat cross-legged in a row close by me. There was no administration of chloroform by a skilled anæsthetist, no careful dressing of the injury by a white-aproned nurse, none of the usual accessories of the ordinary hospital; for my operating theatre had a carpet of greensward starred with wild flowers, and its ceiling was the deep blue sky of midsummer. Instead of the rows of students who usually grace these scientific ceremonies, scores of the snow-white doves that are considered sacred throughout Turkey paused now and then in their cooings, as they fluttered round the minarets of the ancient mosque above the willow grove and looked down upon the strange scene below them. The wounded soldiers took their turns each in his proper order; and as I sat on the willow stump a man with a thumb or finger, as the case might be, mangled into a shocking pulp of festering flesh, would hold up his injured hand to me as he sat on the grass at my feet, and would look on without flinching while I cut away the rotting flesh, trimmed up the place, and washed and dressed the bleeding stump that still remained. I did over a dozen of these cases in one morning; and later in the campaign, when the fighting in the redoubts began, I have amputated as many as twenty-seven fingers in succession.
One result of the frequency of these finger wounds was that they formed a convenient pretext for escaping service in the ranks; and though the Turkish soldiers were too brave to think of malingering, there was one Arab regiment in which the offence became very common. This was the regiment which had already shown the white feather during the battle, and which was only induced to hold its ground by the threat of Osman Pasha that unless the men stood firm he would himself open fire on them from headquarters, and catch them between the Russian fusillade and the fire of their own side. Compelled by this unpleasant prospect, the regiment rallied, and afterwards gave a good account of itself; but, as might be supposed, the men were not in love with fighting, and many of them hit on the device of deliberately blowing off the trigger-finger so as to be unfit for further service. We had a good many of them to treat, and at last Osman Pasha got to hear of it, and of course was very savage at the malingering. He at once issued an order that the next man found guilty of maiming himself in this way would be instantly shot, and the threat, as it turned out, was no idle one.