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 my way to Sadik Pasha's abode I saw a Turkish soldier wearing a very fine pair of Russian high boots that had evidently belonged to a Russian officer, and without inquiring too closely how they had been procured I proceeded to do a deal. My own boots were thin patent leather riding-boots, which looked very nice, but were quite unsuitable for walking; so I persuaded the Turk to accept them, together with three piastres, or sixpence, in return for the more useful if less ornamental pair. The faithful servant of the Prophet was delighted with his bargain, and strutted about in my fashionable Bond Street patent leathers admiring himself, while I, for my part, had changed my nationality by stepping literally into the boots of a Russian.

Old Sadik Pasha gave me a warm welcome. I found him squatting on his haunches, with a praying-mat under him, looking the picture of contented cheerfulness. As the weather was pretty hot, he had rigged an awning over the top of his subterranean domicile to keep the sun off, and Kronberg and I squatted down beside him to hear all the news.

It was like dropping in to see a man at his club—with one or two slight differences. Sadik Pasha ordered coffee for three; and though we were six feet underground, the Roumanians in the Grivitza redoubt must have divined instinctively that we were having refreshments, for they decided to serve dessert. Finding it impossible to do much with the ordinary shells, they had pressed a mortar into the service, and just as the man was coming with the coffee they fired another projectile from this ingenious engine of warfare. Now the specific charm of the mortar is that it throws a shell with a very high trajectory, so that the projectile can soar like a hawk into the heavens and swoop down perpendicularly upon its prey. With all their ingenuity the Turks had not succeeded in devising a protection from this mode of annoyance; and as the Turkish soldier was coming along like a well drilled waiter with a tray on his arm containing three cups of coffee, the mortar-shell exploded in the redoubt. No one was killed, but a fragment of the casing knocked the tray and the cups and saucers into smithereens, and Sadik Pasha had to order "The same again, please." This time the coffee reached the consumer without any interruption in transit; and I was in the act of drinking mine when another shell exploded in the redoubt about ten feet distant from where we were sitting, and made a hole in the ground big enough to bury a man in. I was so startled that I poured the greater part of my coffee over my breeches instead of into my mouth, and old Sadik Pasha chuckled mightily over my want of sang-froid. He gave me a cordial invitation to come and stop with him for a week, assuring me that I would soon get used to little accidents like that.

I was too polite to tell Sadik Pasha that, much as I liked his company, the smell round his house was so unpleasant that I felt obliged to decline his invitation. Owing to the inability of the parlementaires to come to terms at the conference which I have already described, the bodies of the Turks and Russians lying between Sadik's redoubt and the Grivitza work remained unburied, and the stench was so terrible that Kronberg was actually sick while we were calling on our hardy little entertainer, and I myself was very nearly guilty of the same solecism.

Owing to the vigilance of nos amis les ennemis, who saluted us so warmly on our arrival at the redoubt, Kronberg and I prolonged our call until it was dusk, and amused ourselves as well as we could in the redoubt. Occasionally we elevated a fez on a bayonet, and drew the fire of a dozen Roumanian rifles at once. Then we returned the compliment with much empressement. In this pleasant interchange of civilities the day wore to a close; and when it was dark we said au revoir to Sadik Pasha, slipped out at the back, found our horses, and rode into the town again.

Kronberg was, as I have said, a capital fellow, plucky as a lion and generous to a fault. He hated the Bulgarians bitterly, but never allowed his detestation of them as a class to outweigh his sense of justice. There was a Bulgarian of some rank and standing in Plevna whom Osman Pasha suspected of allowing his Russophile inclinations to go too far. In fact, the Muchir believed that the man was a Russian spy, and he gave orders to have him shot. Kronberg and Rookh were quartered in this Bulgarian's house; and when the sentence was made known, the man's wife went to them in a terrible state of grief and anxiety, imploring them on her knees to save her husband, and swearing with the most solemn protestations that he was absolutely innocent. Kronberg and Rookh were of the same opinion; and knowing that I had a little influence with the headquarters staff, they came to me and asked me to see Osman Pasha on the subject, and ask him to reconsider his decision. Osman Pasha listened to my representations very courteously, and I was so far successful that he consented to the man being simply locked up instead of being shot. The Bulgarian's life was spared, and he was sent down as a prisoner to Constantinople when the road was opened up by Chefket Pasha.

It was at this period that my hospital work, which had previously proceeded on regulated lines, with a hopeful measure of success attending my efforts, began to degenerate into a desperate, single-handed struggle against wounds, want, filth, disease, and death.

I was sent to take charge of a large building which had been converted into a hospital, and was already overcrowded with the most pitiable cases. The building stood in several acres of ground on the bank of the Tutchenitza, and about a quarter of a mile from the town, up stream. It had previously been occupied by a wealthy Turk, and consisted really of two large houses, one behind the other, and connected by a passage. The house in the rear had been the harem, while the one in front had been occupied by the old Turk and the male members of the household. There was a small well kept garden leading up to the central entrance, and a picket fence with a gate shut it off from the road. There were two large rooms, one on each side of the front door, and two more behind the staircase, with others upstairs and in the building attached at the rear. Altogether there must have been about twelve large rooms, high, fairly well ventilated, and whitewashed; but more than half of them had no beds, and the forms of the tortured soldiers were huddled together in their clothes on the bare boards. When I went there first, I had two hundred and fifty men to look after, and the task appeared such a hopeless one that my heart sank within me.

We had a hundred beds in the hospital, and a small supply of extra mattresses and blankets; but those were soon apportioned, and for the other unfortunates nothing remained but to lie huddled up on the floor in the clothes in which they had been shot. They lay on the floor of the passages as well as in the rooms, and were packed so closely that it was most difficult to pick one's way through the hospital without treading on them. In one room, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, I had sixteen men, all hideously wounded, dying hard on the hard boards. The bare, whitewashed walls were splashed with blood, which had turned to rusty dark brown stains, and the horrors of the place can only be faintly hinted at. I was the only medical man on duty in that hospital, with a couple of jarra bashis, or dispensers, to assist in dressing, and a squad of Turkish soldiers as hospital nurses. I had chloroform, it is true, but no other drugs of any kind; for the first supply of medicines, as I have explained before, fell into the hands of the Russians when they captured the tail waggons of the convoy. Worse than all, I saw with dismay that the stock of antiseptic dressings was giving out, and that unless it could be replenished the fearful scourge of hospital gangrene was already threatening us closely.

In the large room in which sixty men were lying, some on stretcher-beds, some on mattresses, and many on the floor, the boards were covered with blood and filth like a shambles. Round many of the sufferers pools of pus had formed on the floor, and the smell was terrible. Here, where these brave men were dying, the atmosphere was intolerable, stifling, asphyxiating. As their eyes roamed round that house of suffering instinctively searching for relief, they rested at intervals on small glass windows set high up in the staring whitewashed wall. Through the latticed panes they could see small squares of far blue sky, and now and then there flitted past one of the white doves that Moslems regard as sacred, on its way to the willows on the bank of the Tutchenitza.