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

To add to the horrors of the general situation, confluent small-pox made its appearance among the wounded; and as I had no means of isolating the patients, it quickly spread. Then several cases of typhoid fever broke out, owing to the insanitary conditions; but strangely enough the disease did not spread, and the mortality from it was small. Imagine the miseries of an unhappy man, who, while suffering from a smashed thigh which prevented him from even moving to resist the maggots that assailed him, was then smitten with small-pox or typhoid fever!

Little by little the septic troubles increased, and at last the crown of misery was reached when hospital gangrene made its appearance. Few civilian medical men now practising have ever seen hospital gangrene; but the records of the terrible mischief which it produced in the days before the discovery of the antiseptic treatment are still extant. The patients who took the hospital gangrene usually suffered considerably, while they rotted away before my eyes, and I was powerless to help them.

The men also got covered with body lice; and as I spent fourteen hours a day as a rule lifting them up, washing them, and dressing their wounds, the noxious insects attacked me too, and during the whole of my subsequent stay in Plevna I was never absolutely free from them. I had only two flannel shirts, and one of these was boiled every day by my servant; but in spite of all precautions, I could never keep free from the insect pests.

Every morning when I went to the hospital the first thing that met my eyes as I opened the little wicket-gate leading into the garden was the row of corpses of the men who had died during the previous night. They were put out there to wait for the burial parties, and the sight never failed to make a profound impression on me. As I walked past them up the path the sight of those dead faces fascinated me; and when I found among them men who were my special favourites, and who had told me the stories of their simple, uneventful lives, and of their wives and children waiting for them in distant parts of the Turkish Empire, a feeling of overpowering depression came over me. I was so utterly helpless to save them, and I was fighting such a hopeless battle, that once or twice I sat down in the hospital and cried like a child. As fast as the men died fresh ones were brought in, and often I found that twenty old faces had gone during the night and that the same number of new ones awaited me in the morning. Skirmishes were always going on between the outposts, and the intermittent bombardment claimed a daily quota of victims, a considerable proportion of whom were sent to me for treatment.

It was at this period that I was wounded for the first and last time out of all the scores of occasions that I have been under fire. It was a mere flesh wound, little more indeed than a scratch; but as I was in a very low state of health from continuous overwork and under-feeding, the flesh wound set up a local condition which still further reduced my strength, and contributed eventually to my leaving Plevna for a short rest. As I was unable to get back again, owing to the Russians closing the road, I was prevented from witnessing the last pathetic scene of all, when Osman Pasha's heroic defence was exhausted, and he had to surrender to the invader.

A chance shot from a Russian field-gun did it for me, during the desultory firing that went on languidly from day to day between the opposing redoubts. I was riding out one morning to visit Sadik Pasha, and was cantering leisurely across to the Bash Tabiya, when I heard the scream of a shell, and recognized instinctively that it was coming my way. One got so used to estimating the course of shells from constant practice that one could pretty well tell by the sound where a particular shell was likely to fall. My charger too was a perfect old war-hardened veteran, and he took no more notice of a shell exploding five yards in front of his nose than if it had been a custard-apple. When I heard the whistle of the shell, I stuck the spurs in and tried to get out of the way in time; but I did not succeed, and when it exploded a bit of the casing took me in the back of the neck with a sharp, burning shock that felt as if I had been struck with a piece of red-hot iron. When I put my hand up to the place, I drew it back covered with blood; but I quickly discovered that it was a mere surface wound, and when I got back to town and bandaged it, I found that it did not in the least interfere with the performance of my medical duties. However, an abscess formed on the place, and troubled me a good deal.

I was very much overworked. Neither food nor rest was plentiful. I never saw a compatriot, and I spent all my waking hours in the midst of horrible sufferings which I was powerless to alleviate. It was no wonder, under these circumstances, that I became despondent; and after this lapse of time I may as well confess that the thought occurred to me whether it would not be better to blow my brains out than go on in the misery any longer. But when I looked round on those magnificent men—more long-suffering, patient, and courageous men I have never seen in my life—I banished the dark thought, and went back to the work with all the spirit I could muster. Sometimes even now when I lie awake at night I see myself again dressed in a blood-stained shirt and pair of trousers, as I picked my way among the huddled forms with their ashen faces bound up in those fantastic bandages of coloured print. I see the pools of curdled blood on the floor, the staring whitewashed walls, and the little squares of blue sky through the latticed windows. I hear the stifled moans and I catch the delirious murmurs of that Anatolian Turk as in his death-throes, like Falstaff "he babbled o' green fields."

Although we had no female nurses, still I found that the Turkish women, whenever they had an opportunity, attended to the wounded with the devotion of a Florence Nightingale. There was a small outbuilding in the grounds that surrounded the hospital, and this also was filled with wounded. One day I found two Turkish women there, and learned that they were frequent visitors, bringing milk and broth to the wounded. When I saw them, they were moving silently about in their long white robes, with only the eyes showing through their thick yashmaks. One exceptionally hideous case in the outbuilding received attention from them. The man had been struck on the side of the face by a shell, which carried away the whole of his upper and lower jaws. Only his eyes remained, looking plaintively out above the mangled mass that had once been a human face. The Turkish women could just see by the roots of the tongue the position of the gullet, and they kept the unfortunate wretch alive for four days by pouring milk down his throat.

One evening, as I was leaving the hospital almost heart-broken, three men were brought in, and I went back to attend to them. One man had both his legs taken off by a shell from a heavy siege-gun, and was blanched from loss of blood; the second had been struck by a shell, which had carried away arm and shoulder together; the third was shot through the lungs by a rifle-bullet. Next morning, when I returned to the hospital, I saw the three men lying out dead on the path as soon as I opened the gate. Some idea of the hopelessness of my position may be gathered by the medical reader, when he learns that I had forty-seven compound comminuted fractures under my hands at one time, and all were suppurating, while I had no appliances of any kind for dressing them properly.