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

I often paid a visit to the Bash Tabiya in the afternoon to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette with old Sadik Pasha, who was in command, and these afternoon calls were always attended with a certain amount of risk. The fellows in the Grivitza redoubt used to keep a look out for visitors; but the range was over eight hundred yards, and I used to skip across those thirty yards of exposed space, dodging like a strong blue rock before the barrels of the pigeon-shooter, and always coming through safely. It did not take me more than three seconds to cover the distance, and before they could sight their rifles I was across.

At about three o'clock every afternoon Ahmet brought my horse down to the hospital, and I went for a ride out to the redoubts, and paid my respects to one or other of the commanders. One day a Turkish major in one of them consulted me about an eruption on his chin. He was mightily concerned about it, and I promised to bring him some ointment to allay the unpleasant symptoms. As a matter of fact, I believe it was barber's itch that he had. Accordingly I rode out on the following day with the ointment to the redoubt, which was commanded by a Russian redoubt built on the slope of a hill about a thousand yards away. As I got up to our redoubt there were three soldiers sitting on the rear wall smoking cigarettes, and I called to one of them to come and hold my horse. The one who came was a magnificently built fellow. He was in great good humour, laughing and chatting with his comrades, and he came out of the redoubt and held my bridle while I walked into the work. As I did so the officer in command of the Russian redoubt, seeing a horseman approaching the work opposite to him, thought that it would be good fun to have a shot at him; so he let drive at me with three field-guns. I saw the three puffs of smoke together as I walked into the redoubt. One shell buried itself in the front wall of the redoubt without exploding, another burst in the redoubt, and the third passed over the redoubt and exploded just behind it. The casing of the shell that exploded inside wounded a man in the heel, taking half the boot off and cutting the heel to the bone. He was a black soldier, a Nubian. I was looking after him, when some one called out to me to come outside; and the first thing I saw was my horse quietly grazing about fifty yards at the rear of the redoubt. The man who had been holding him had been cut in two by the third shell. He was quite dead. I went back into the redoubt, and dressed the Nubian's heel. Then the Turkish major and I had coffee and cigarettes together, and I gave him the ointment for his chin, whereat he was much gratified. We were so much accustomed to whole hecatombs of victims in those days, that we were callous to a single casualty.

We were beginning to get a little short of food in Plevna; and though I was not very particular about my cuisine and got on fairly well on boiled beans and rice, I felt sorry for poor Czetwertinski, who had been very bad with dysentery, and for whom I prescribed nourishing food in vain, for there was no one to make up the prescription. However, one morning I noticed a fine flock of geese in the yard of a Bulgarian house between my place and the hospital, so I approached the proprietor with an eye to purchase. He was a sour-tempered fellow; and though I offered him a medjidie apiece for the geese, he declined to trade. When I got home again that night and sat down to more boiled beans, I casually mentioned to Ahmet that there were a nice lot of geese in a Bulgarian house not far away. Next night all the geese were in our yard. I did not inquire too closely the motive which impelled the toothsome birds to seek for change of scene; but it flashed across me that Ahmet and his mate Faizi were young and strong, and also that they were Circassians. We ate four of the geese in our house, and gave the rest away to my brother surgeons. There were a dozen of them originally, and I sent the Bulgarian goose-farmer a couple of Turkish liras for them, so that he did not do so badly after all out of his forced sale.

Although big engagements seemed at an end for the present, and the Russians evidently intended to starve us out, instead of attempting to take Plevna by assault, still we had plenty of casual skirmishes to keep us in form and remind us that we were not at a picnic. Towards the end of September, Mustapha Bey was ordered to go out with a squadron of cavalry across the Vid and reconnoitre the Sofia road, to see what sort of a force the Russians had placed there. I was a great favourite with old Mustapha, and he made an application to Osman Pasha that I should be allowed to accompany the column.

Permission was readily granted, and one beautiful morning I found myself cantering out of Plevna, with Mustapha Bey and Czetwertinski at the head of a troop of four hundred regular cavalry and three hundred Circassians. We rode out to the foot of the Janik Bair colline below Opanetz, and from that point we could see the village of Dolni-Netropol, about a mile away.

As we were riding towards that village the troop suddenly halted, and Czetwertinski declared that he could make out a regiment of infantry drawn up about three-quarters of a mile away. We held a consultation, and Czetwertinski said that he could see a battery of Russian artillery in position as well. I had a great reputation for being sharp-sighted in those days, and was generally the first to see the enemy; but I fancied that what Czetwertinski saw was really a herd of the small black cattle of the country.

"Wait here a moment while I go on and have a look," I shouted; and sticking the spurs into my horse, I galloped forward by myself.

When I had gone about two hundred yards, I caught sight of a Russian vedette, galloping for his life towards Netropol. The Circassians saw him too, and in a second they were after him like greyhounds coursing a hare. The whole troop followed them; but before we had gone a furlong we heard the sharp crack of the rifles, and the piff-paff of the bullets striking the ground all round us.

Old Mustapha was taken by surprise, and was quite disconcerted for the moment; but we galloped on to the next ridge, and we found that the Circassians had thrown themselves on the ground at the top of the ridge in skirmishing order, and were busily blazing at a Russian cavalry regiment about five hundred yards away. We all took up the same order, lying down and firing away as fast as we could pull our triggers at the dense masses of the enemy scarcely a quarter of a mile away. I was on the extreme right, and I kept at it with my Winchester, vaguely wondering how long that sort of thing could last before we were driven back by the vastly outnumbering Russian force.