As soon as we were installed we had time to look round, and my first impression of Erzeroum was a very favourable one. I found that we had come to a very picturesque town, lying under the lee of a range of mountains which rose to a height of six thousand feet, the town itself being about four thousand feet above the sea level. A remarkable feature about the place was the entire absence of timber, which I noticed at once with the apprehension of an old campaigner who knew the value of a supply of fuel and the horrible discomfort of being without it. I found that the nearest timber was seventy miles away, where the great forest of Soghanli Dagh was situated. There were very few trees in the town, and the mountains were great masses of bare rock, without a trace of vegetation to hide their cold nakedness. Under these circumstances the inhabitants relied for fuel principally on dried camel's dung, which was a most precarious source of supply.
Erzeroum was surrounded by a great wall, strengthened by forts at intervals, and also by a moat and drawbridge. It was a very important town, because nearly all the trade from Teheran went through it; and it had a population of forty thousand inhabitants, most of whom were Armenians. The houses were strongly built of stone, with flat roofs, which were used by the inmates as promenades during the warm evenings; and the bright colours affected by the Turkish women in their dress lent colour and animation to the scene. The town contained several handsome Armenian churches, the inner walls of which were decorated with beautiful blue tiles; and the konak, or townhall, was a very handsome structure. The water supply was chiefly drawn from wells, and there was besides a small stream that came down from the mountains, while the Euphrates was only four miles away.
Mr. Zohrab, who was to all intents and purposes an Englishman, and had an English wife and two sons, introduced all of us newcomers to Mukhtar Pasha, the commander-in-chief, who welcomed us most kindly, and thanked us for coming. We found that Fetherstonhaugh, Denniston, and Pinkerton were in charge of a large hospital, which was known as Lord Blantyre's Hospital; and I arranged to take over from the Turks a large hospital which had been organized in the Yeni Khan. Pinkerton agreed to come over to me, as the other two could get through all the work at Lord Blantyre's Hospital; so Pinkerton, Woods, and myself, with Harvey and Captain Morisot as assistants, were installed in the Yeni Khan, and took over all the staff of assistants, servants, and jarra bashis that had been employed under the Turks. There were two of these jarra bashis; and one of them, a Turkish sergeant, who had been trained as a dresser, was one of the hardest and most conscientious workers as well as one of the best fellows that I met in Turkey. I agreed to pay all those whom I took over wages at the rate of half what they received from the Turkish Government in addition to their ordinary pay; and as they could never look forward with any degree of certainty to receiving their money from the Turks, they had an additional incentive to faithful service, and I was enabled to secure a direct control over them by holding the power of the purse. I also took on a Hungarian surgeon, named Schmidt, to assist us. He was given a room in the hospital, and was made the house surgeon; so that in cases of hæmorrhage there was always a competent person ready to arrest it until one of us could come up.
We soon had everything ship-shape in the old khan, which was converted into a well equipped hospital, containing at the outset three hundred beds. It was very different from the awful building that I had left behind in Plevna. The main ward of our Stafford House Hospital was a hundred feet long, with a width of sixty-five feet and a height of thirty feet. It was ventilated and lighted by means of large glass skylights, and warmed by two large stoves. This ward contained ninety-eight beds, and there was another large one containing sixty-two beds, while smaller rooms, opening off these large ones, provided accommodation for six or eight patients each, the total number of patients when I took over control being three hundred. We had an operating-room, a storeroom, and all the necessary offices. In the main wards the scene was almost picturesque, if any hospital ever could be picturesque; for the place was scrupulously clean, and the beds were dressed with Persian quilts, bright with the most gorgeous colours. As the midday sunbeams poured in through the skylights overhead, they lit up the scarlets and the greens, the cobalt blues and lemon yellows, the deep crimson of the rose, the pink of the geranium, and the purple of the violet, until the whole place looked like an immense garden full of flowers. But against this background of brilliant colours the white, drawn faces of the wounded soldiers stood out in pitiful contrast, and the gay hues only threw into still stronger relief the ghastly sufferings.
At first we had no cases of sickness, and none but wounded men to treat. Our death-rate was low—in the first week we only had six deaths out of three hundred patients, and we sent thirty men out cured to rejoin their regiments. After the hideous experiences in Plevna, this state of things was a blessed relief, and we became quite light-hearted. But before I left Erzeroum I had seen sufferings and horrors before which the sufferings and horrors of the Plevna hospital paled into insignificance.
The first sign of coming trouble was the discovery one morning of a case of genuine typhus and several cases of typhoid. These we sent away at once to the medical central hospital, as we took over our hospital with the stipulation that we were to treat only wounded cases. But that solitary case of typhus worried me a good deal, and it seemed to presage with dreadful certainty the mischief that was to come.
CHAPTER XIII.
A BELEAGUERED CITY.
The Scourge of Typhus—Pyæmia and Pneumonia—Terrible Cold—Outposts frozen to Death—Fall of Kars—The March of the Wounded—One Hundred and Eighty Miles over the Snow—Ghastly Effects of Frostbite—The Skeleton Hands—Overcrowding in the Hospitals—Dr. Fetherstonhaugh falls Ill—A Strange Delusion—"After Long Years"—Edmund O'Donovan—A Circassian Dinner Party—Sucking-pig à l'Irlandaise—A Novel Target—Departure of Mr. Zohrab—We move into the Consulate—Exodus to Erzinghan—An Awful Sacrifice—Christmas in a Besieged Town—A Remarkable Plum Pudding—Illness of Pinkerton—Funerals in Erzeroum—Casting out the Dead—"The Lean Dogs beneath the Wall"—An Army Surgeon's Death—I fall Sick with Typhus—Heroic Devotion of James Denniston—Some of my Nurses—How I recovered—A Scientific Experiment—The Brain of a Comatose Person—Vachin's Discomfiture.