In spite of fever and dysentery, gunshot wounds in horrible variety and septic disease in every hospital, so strangely is the Anglo-Saxon mind constituted that we decided to "enjoy ourselves" at Christmas, although the Russians were practically knocking at our gates. My previous Christmas dinner consisted of a handful of maize cobs eaten in solitude on the ice-bound road to Orkhanieh. During the intervening year I had lived and worked and suffered much—and almost to my own astonishment I was still alive. So here at Erzeroum I proposed to have a Christmas festivity, and Pinkerton, Denniston, and Woods eagerly accepted the suggestion. We decided to invite all the European doctors in the town, and to give them a real English Christmas dinner, for which great preparations had to be made.
When we took over Mr. Zohrab's house, we also assumed a right title and interest in the services of two sturdy henchmen. One was old Tom Rennison, who had been dragoman for General Williams during the siege of Erzeroum thirty years before, and the other was an Armenian named Vachin. Tom Rennison, veteran campaigner as he was, had never seen mince-pies made, so to speak, under fire; and Vachin knew more about the preparation of pilaf than plum pudding. Consequently not only the arrangement of the menu, but the actual work of cooking it, devolved upon the medical staff; and I am sorry to say that, though by this time there were few things in surgery which we would not attempt, from disarticulation of a thumb to amputation of a thigh, nevertheless in the science of cooking we were painfully unlearned. Lister was an open book to us; but the dark sayings of Brillat-Savarin were as obscure as the Rig-Vedas.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself held a consultation over the plum pudding, which was intended to beget envy and jealousy in the hearts of the Austrian and Hungarian doctors, and to be a dazzling example of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon cooking over the unsubstantial kickshaws of continental cuisines. I noticed that Vachin, who was always an ill disposed fellow, looked undisguisedly contemptuous of our preparations, and that old Tom Rennison was obviously fluctuating between the extremes of hope and fear. It is not easy to recollect exactly what was in that pudding. Denniston had heard that suet was an ingredient of supreme importance, so the yellow fat was cut from the joint of beef which had been moving about the yard only two days before as the sirloin of Mr. Zohrab's best heifer. We found plenty of currants and raisins among the stores; but there was no candied peel, and the spices which had been imported from Teheran somehow smelt quite unlike the unconvincing substance that we remembered to have seen in our youth at the suburban grocer's. We had plenty of flour of course, and we mixed our chef-d'œuvre in a big brown pot. It was a viscous, œdematous mass, of the consistency of soft indiarubber, when we had done mixing it, and it resembled nothing so much as a bucketful of Zante currants which had fallen by accident into a glue-pot. The other fellows made some very discouraging remarks; but I tied up the ghastly mixture in half a clean sheet, and sat up all night on Christmas Eve boiling it in the iron pot.
On Christmas night we had a grand banquet, and about twenty other European doctors came in answer to our invitations to receive our hospitality. We explained to them at some length that we were going to give them a real English dinner, which was a treat that they had probably never enjoyed before, and very likely might never enjoy again.
Certainly the beef was a little tough, as the hapless heifer had only been sacrificed on the previous day, and then there was no horse-radish and very little gravy; but the geese were first-rate. Like everything else in Asia Minor, they were evidently of great antiquity. Probably they had seen the former siege of Erzeroum; but age, which weakens most other things, had strengthened their limbs and steeled their muscles, until to disintegrate the closely knitted tissues was a veritable feat of strength, and one swallowed a mouthful with the comfortable glow of satisfaction that follows the surmounting of a desperate difficulty. Of the mince-pies I cannot speak with certainty, for Woods had taken complete control over the manufacture of these delicious delicacies, and, much as I respected my colleague, I was suspicious of his ingredients. I can testify, however, from the simple experience of lifting one up from the dish that the mince-pies were solid and weighty additions to the menu. I waited with some anxiety for the pudding, and the happiness that the artist feels in a work completed came over me as I saw old Tom Rennison bearing in the dish containing the pudding, surrounded by leaping tongues of blue flame from the burning brandy. Up to this period the Hungarian doctors had been politely complimentary, and had accepted slabs of heifer's flesh as hard as boot leather and chunks of goose that would have made excellent ammunition for siege artillery as typical dishes of a correct English dinner. By dint of washing the food down with plenty of wine and many tumblers of brandy-and-water, they struggled along gamely through the first courses; but when they received their portions of the plum pudding they distinctly jibbed. With the flames playing round its charred, excoriated surface, it certainly had a diabolical look, and it held together with a glutinous consistency that for an appreciable number of seconds defied the attack even of a carving-knife. The Hungarian doctors viewed their plates with an alarmed suspicion that was too genuine to be concealed, and I must confess that when I got a spoonful of my masterpiece into my mouth the taste did not compensate in the least for the difficulty of detaching the fragment from the surrounding bed-rock. That was the first and last time that I cooked a plum pudding.
In spite of these little drawbacks, however, we all thoroughly enjoyed our Christmas dinner, and we made a fair hole in Mr. Zohrab's cellar, which was well stocked with wines and spirits and also with beer and porter. The dawn was coming up over the snow on the distant hills when we separated, laughing, singing, and wishing each other a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Within a fortnight nearly every one of us was down with typhus, and within a month more than half of our number were dead.
The first of the English doctors to catch the fever was poor Pinkerton. He was always terribly frightened of it, and used to carry quantities of camphor about in his pockets as a disinfectant; but with the epidemic raging as it was, any attempt at personal disinfection for a medical man attending the cases was practically hopeless. Pinkerton was always talking about his dread of getting typhus, and saying that if he caught it he would never get over it. This made Denniston and myself very anxious about him; for though he was a splendidly built, handsome fellow, with an excellent constitution, his apprehensions laid him open to attack more readily, and would certainly decrease his chance of recovery if the fever got its clutch upon him. Wrought up to a state of high nervous tension by continually moving among the sick and the dying, it was not to be wondered at that we attached significance to the veriest trifles, and both Denniston and myself recollected with dismay that every one of our patients who had had a presentiment of death up to that time had died.
On the last day of the old year Pinkerton became ill, and we put him to bed. He was very despondent, and I could see at once that he had an attack of the most malignant typhus. He was a very bad patient, and would take neither his medicine nor his nourishment without a great deal of trouble. Our number was now reduced to two, and Denniston and myself looked at each other every morning with questioning gaze. Fortunately Denniston had had malignant typhus in his student days at Glasgow, and was not likely to take it again, while I felt that if I could only pull through we might still be able to keep on the two hospitals. After three or four days Pinkerton fell into a semi-comatose condition, from which he never emerged, but lay in bed moaning feebly, and talking incoherently at intervals of fighting and of operations and of places and people whose names were unfamiliar to me.
How clearly those dreadful days come back! We had the ever present, bitter, numbing cold, and the ceaseless work in the hospital as one passed from bed to bed, from the moaning wounded to the poor wretches who were being consumed by the fires of fever, and thence to the ghastly mutilated creatures who had lost hands, feet, ears, and even noses by frostbite. Then there was in addition the anxiety about Pinkerton, and the fear that one or both of us two survivors would succumb to the strain, and thus leave the bulk of the sick and wounded without medical succour. In addition to it all was the nervous strain of waiting for the expected Russian attack, which would have been gladly welcomed as a relief from the intolerable tension.