As we went round the hospital wards, now that fever had made its appearance, needless to say that we examined each patient anxiously, and every day we found three or four more cases of typhus among the wounded men. These we weeded out, and placed in a room specially prepared to receive them, for on account of the severity of their wounds we could not send them away to the central hospital.
Early in December the weather got very bad. There was a heavy fall of snow, and the hospitals were filled with sick, until altogether there were about four thousand sick and wounded in the town. Captain Morisot and Mr. Harvey were most valuable assistants; but in the first week of December Mr. Harvey, who was wanted at Constantinople, had to leave, much to our regret. Williams, our dragoman, who had been delayed on the road by the bad weather, came up with the stores, and took his place, turning out a very useful assistant.
Pyæmia began to make great ravages, and the intense cold increased the sufferings of the wounded. I amputated a man's arm at the shoulder joint, and hoped to pull him through; but the weather beat me, for he took pleurisy, and went off in a day.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself lived in the great, bare Armenian house with Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston. Every morning we went off to our respective hospitals, returned home to lunch, and then went back in the afternoon to work again. Wood for fuel cost us twopence per pound, and rations were poor and scarce; but we pegged away doggedly, and Mr. Zohrab was very good to us. He had a splendid house amply provisioned for the winter, and he was most hospitable in his invitations to dinner; while his wife, who was a charming Englishwoman, was always cheering us up, and his two sons often gave us a hand at the hospital.
An ominous silence was maintained by our Russian besiegers, and we found that they had withdrawn the greater number of the troops from Erzeroum in order to carry out the assault on Kars. Typhus, pyæmia, pneumonia, and the bitter, deadening cold were working for the Russians, and slew as many of the defenders of Erzeroum daily as would have fallen under the heaviest shell fire. Woods became ill; and as there was evidently heavy work before us, I sent him down to Constantinople, thus reducing the strength of our little medical garrison by one.
Snow began to fall heavily, and soon the streets were covered to a depth of several feet. At night the thermometer dropped to forty degrees below freezing-point, and the soldiers in the open suffered severely. Every morning five or six men were found frozen to death on outpost duty, lying in the snow with their eyes closed and their rifles clasped in their arms.
Meanwhile General Melikoff was making preparations for his great attack on Kars, and at last the long expected assault was delivered, and the Russians with their strange, untranslatable cry of "Nichivo," which is the ultimate expression of a reckless bravery that refuses to count any cost, swept in upon the Turkish batteries, and took the town.
Melikoff could not accommodate his numerous wounded prisoners with quarters, so he conceived the brilliant idea of sending them on to us; and, presenting each man who could walk with a blanket and a few piastres, he despatched the men on their journey from Kars to Erzeroum. What a march was that! The snow lay thickly on the frozen ground, and for league after league the legion of the wounded dragged themselves along, staining the snow with their blood as they "blazed" their pathway from Kars to Erzeroum. Hundreds dropped dead on that terrible march, and Mukhtar Pasha told me that out of two thousand men who left Kars only three hundred and seventeen reached Erzeroum. About fifty of the survivors came to our hospital, and one of them told me that he left with a party of thirty, only ten of whom came through alive, and of these ten no fewer than seven lost all their toes from frostbite.