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

On the night after the battle, the Russian troops in the Grivitza redoubt Number 1, or the Kanli Tabiya, made a desperate sortie with the object of capturing the Number 2 redoubt, or, as we called it, the Bash Tabiya.

It is strange how the sleeping brain adjusts itself to circumstances—sleeps with one eye open, as it were. I could always sleep soundly under the fire of the heavy guns, even in a redoubt, because my brain recognized that they were practically harmless when we were under cover; but as soon as the rattle of the rifles began, I invariably awoke at once with an instinctive knowledge that the fight was approaching a crisis. So it was on the night after the battle. The Russian cannon continued to boom sullenly at intervals, and, worn out with fatigue as I was, they only lulled me to a deeper slumber in my quarters in the town. Presently, however, a rifle volley rang out, quickly answered by another and another. In a second I was out of my sheepskin rug and on my verandah, from which I could see the night attack three miles away. The night was dark and drizzling; but looking in a north-easterly direction towards the line of the Janik Bair redoubts, I could see the flash of the volleys and the spirting flame of the artillery as the Russians leaped from their redoubt upon the Bash Tabiya, only one hundred and eighty yards distant from them. The Bash Tabiya was strongly garrisoned. Its heavy guns swept every yard of the ground between it and the newly captured forts; and its defenders poured an incessant hail of bullets from a triple line of rifle-barrels upon the attacking troops. To succeed under such circumstances was well nigh impossible, and after a few minutes of this awful fire the Russian remnant broke and fled back to the protection of the redoubt.

It was only on the morrow that we realized what a complete victory we had won in the battle of the previous day, because we could then see plainly that the Russians had suffered terrible losses and had achieved absolutely nothing. We began to feel more secure of our position; and the wounded, who had all been sent away to the lower end of the town, were brought back again and placed in temporary hospitals near our central depot. In the previous battles we had been accustomed to send the wounded away to Sofia at once, and the wisdom of Osman Pasha's decision in this matter was now made apparent. Insufficient as was our hospital accommodation, it was doubly fortunate that we were not encumbered with the wounded from the previous battles as well, because we now had about four thousand patients to deal with, and there was no chance of sending them away because we realized at last that we were in a state of siege. The Russians were all round Plevna, and they barred the Orkhanieh road.

We of the medical staff had four days of real hard work after the battle. There were an immense number of operations to perform; and as Osman Effendi and myself had to perform the greater number of them, our energies were taxed to the utmost. There were about forty doctors all told in Plevna, to deal with four thousand cases or thereabouts. Owing to the continuous nature of the work, I never went back to my quarters during the week after the battle, but used to sleep at the hospital. My Circassian servant cooked my food, such as it was, at my house, and brought it down to me while I was at work. As on the previous occasions, Osman Effendi and myself performed all operations in the open air under a big willow tree on the bank of the Tutchenitza, and in the shadow of an old Turkish mosque, where every evening at sundown an ancient priest, mounting a minaret, called the faithful to prayer.

Although we were greatly assisted by the magnificent physique of the patients, still their extraordinary reluctance to undergo operations perceptibly increased the average mortality. Three days after the battle, I saw a Turkish soldier crawling slowly along the street and stopping every minute. He was holding some object in his hand, and his appearance was so strange that I went over and had a look at him. I found that he had been shot in the abdomen, and about two feet of the small intestine had prolapsed, and was protruding through the wound. It was so altered in appearance by exposure that it looked exactly like a bit of tarred rope. Two of this man's comrades had been wounded, and had died in the hospital—a fact which had made him believe that the hospital treatment was responsible for the fatal termination of their wounds, and he resolutely refused to allow me to touch him with an instrument. The intestine was not strangulated; and if he had allowed me to open up the wound, wash it, and replace the intestine, he would probably have recovered. As it was, he lived for fifteen days in that pitiable condition.

The stoicism of the men was truly remarkable. A soldier was brought to me to be examined one day, and I found that he had been skylarking with a comrade, who had "jobbed" him in the stomach with his bayonet. The surgeon who first saw him could detect only a very small wound in the stomach, and he put a bit of plaster over the place and sent the man away. In a few hours' time the patient became very bad, and I was asked to see him. I asked him at once if he had vomited any blood; and when he replied in the affirmative, I knew that the wall of the abdomen had been perforated, and that his fate was sealed. He was quite cheerful, but he died at the end of twenty-four hours.

As the greater part of the fighting had been done from behind parapets or breastworks, the majority of the wounded were shot through the head or chest, and a large percentage of these wounds necessarily proved fatal. There was an infinite variety in the nature of the wounds. One man came under my hands who received six wounds from one bullet. The ball struck him on the outside of the right arm between the elbow and the shoulder, passed through the arm, through the fleshy portions of the chest, and through the left arm as well, leaving six distinct bullet-holes, all of which I washed and plugged. He made a rapid recovery, and after a few weeks in the hospital went back to the trenches.

Not a single wounded Russian came into my hands after the battle. The Russians always carried their wounded with them when they retired; and after the crowning episode of the battle, when I reached the Kavanlik redoubt as soon as Tewfik Bey had recaptured it, there was not a single living Russian left there. When the final assault was delivered, a Russian captain and eighteen men elected to see it out to the bitter end. Those brave men continued fighting to the last, and were all bayoneted by the Turkish troops who poured, victorious at last, over the parapet. It can readily be imagined that fighting of this sanguinary character left few wounded Russians for us to deal with.

The staff at the principal operating hospital included, besides Osman Effendi and myself, Weinberger, Kustler, Gebhardt, Kronberg, Waldemann, and Rookh. We had also a lot of jarra bashis with a rudimentary idea of surgery to assist us. Each man brought to us for an operation had to wait his turn, and such was the pressure of the work that many of the poor fellows were kept there for four or five days before we could attend to them. Still, at this period a large percentage recovered from their wounds, owing principally to the fact that the accommodation was not overcrowded and that we had few cases of septic disease. We were able to give them a liberal diet, as we had plenty of broth, milk, rice, and biscuits. These biscuits when soaked and steamed proved most useful.

Osman Pasha has been liberally accused of inhuman neglect towards the wounded; but those accusations have been made against him by people who had no opportunity of forming an accurate judgment, and who mistook his inflexible determination to get the wounded away from Plevna for cruelty and want of consideration for their sufferings. I had many opportunities of observing the Muchir during my stay in Plevna, and I can definitely refute these charges of neglect and apathy in the presence of anguish. Unsparing of his troops in battle, Osman Pasha never forgot his wounded men when the fighting was over. At this period, after the third battle, he constantly visited the hospitals, encouraging the wounded by his presence and by his kindly words. He let it be understood, too, that all those members of the medical staff who worked well would be decorated; and it is only bare justice to say that all of them cheerfully performed long hours of very hard work on insufficient food and with little or no sleep during the trying days and nights that followed upon our greatest victory.