Under the Red Crescent / Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and Erzeroum 1877-1878

by Charles S. Ryan; John Sandes

As for my little troop of cavalry with whom I made that desperate charge and still more desperate retreat, it had been absolutely decimated, though Mustapha Bey the colonel, Czetwertinski the captain, and the Turkish lieutenant, all escaped as fortunately as myself.

In the town of Plevna we had plenty of accommodation for the wounded, and all the arrangements for attending to them were in far better order than on the occasion of the first battle. When the main hospital was full, we sent the men off to the smaller hospitals, and many of the less serious cases lay out in the open air all night. It was a repetition in many respects of our experience after the first battle; for we had forty-eight hours of almost continuous work, and then the great bulk of the men were put into carts and sent away to Sofia. On the first night after the artillery firing had ceased, all was quiet, and the only sounds to be heard in the town were the cries and moans of the wounded and the loud creaking of the great wooden-wheeled waggons as they rolled over the cobble-stones outside.

As I have said, we were much better prepared for the reception of the wounded than after the first battle; for we had plenty of instruments, chloroform, antiseptic solutions, and bandages, and, moreover, we had trained a number of the soldiers to act as an ambulance corps. These assistants were able to help us very materially, and had become quite expert dressers. In the majority of cases the wounds were very severe, as the men had fought principally in the trenches, and when hit they were generally shot either through the head or right through the chest.

On August 1 I got away from the hospital at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and rode out to have a look at the battle-field. Near the spot where the Grivitza redoubt was afterwards built the Russian dead lay thickest, and within a space of about two acres on this rising slope I counted fifteen hundred bodies. The spectacle was a horrifying one. Turkish burial parties had already been out burying our dead; but the Russians were left where they fell. Nearly all of them were absolutely naked, for the Bashi-Bazouks had been there already, and had stripped them of arms and clothing completely. I could not help noticing the difference in physique between the Russian soldiers and the Turks. The Russians were far less robust, and many of them seemed to be mere lads, hardly equal to the task of carrying the heavy Berdan or Krenke rifle. Broken gun carriages lay on every side, and the ground was scarred and torn in all directions.

A number of wounded horses, lying on the ground unable to rise, were neighing pitifully, and farther off two or three more with broken legs and entrails hanging out were dragging themselves slowly and painfully to a pool of water that had collected in a hollow at the foot of a hill. I shot four of the unfortunate creatures with my revolver, and put them out of their misery.

Some of the wounded men were in very strange attitudes. One man was kneeling as if in prayer; another was on his hands and knees; another was lying in his own brains. All three had been stripped by the Bashi-Bazouks. The Russian line of retreat could be easily distinguished, for it was marked out by a track of dead bodies laid as plainly as the track of a paper-chase. Here and there I could see where groups of them had tried to make a little stand, and had been shot down thirty or forty or fifty at a time. I saw one dead man in a most extraordinary position. He was stuck in the fork of a tree about fifteen feet from the ground, having evidently climbed it for safety, and then been shot by a stray bullet.

Returning from my visit to the dead, I devoted myself again to the wounded in the hospitals, and performed a number of amputations together with Osman Effendi, who worked splendidly with me. In the intervals of work next day I rode out again to the battle-field, which was beginning to smell terribly, so that we had to send out more burial parties to bury them in large trenches containing eighty or a hundred bodies each. So terrible had been the slaughter that some Russian regiments had literally ceased to exist.

Within a very few days after the battle we had sent away the greater number of the wounded, and only the cases for operation remained. All of these were removed to the main hospital, and Osman Effendi and myself resumed our work upon this new supply of patients. All our operations were done out of doors in the same place under the willow tree near the bank of the Tutchenitza. A great number of cases ended fatally which in a civil hospital would probably have resulted differently; but we did not attempt any intricate operations, and we were also hampered by the fact that the patients frequently preferred to die rather than undergo the amputation of a limb. If a man had a bullet in his knee, for instance, such a thing as excising the knee or laying it open was never thought of, and we simply took the leg off. This is a legitimate course for a surgeon to adopt in time of war, because the skilled attention necessary to the after treatment of a delicate operation was not available, and it was often better surgery to take a man's leg off and preserve his life than to perform an intricate operation in order to save the leg with the probability of the patient succumbing for want of careful nursing afterwards. As in the case of the wounded in the first battle, there were a large number of men whose fingers we had to amputate.

Trade revived quite briskly as soon as things began to settle down again in the town, and the bazaars were all in full swing. Many Spanish Jews, scenting large profits from afar, put in an appearance, and bought Russian coin and arms from the Circassians who had secured the plunder. A Russian rouble was to be had for twopence, and an officer's sword could be had for a franc. I myself bought two beautifully mounted Russian revolvers, which I still possess.