During these early days of January, 1878, the mortality in Erzeroum was something appalling. Out of a total number of about seventeen thousand troops in the town, there were on one day no fewer than three hundred and two deaths, and the daily death-rate frequently rose to two hundred! The weak, emaciated survivors had hardly strength left to dig graves for their dead comrades in the hard and frozen ground. At last they gave up even the pretence of digging, and the bodies were simply carted out about a mile from the main thoroughfares of the town, and left in the snow just inside the city walls.
Of course all conveyances were placed on runners while the snow was on the ground, and the little sleighs which served as dead-carts passed our house every morning at about ten o'clock with their mournful loads collected from the various hospitals. The bodies of the dead soldiers were stripped of their clothing and wrapped in clean white sheets according to the Moslem custom. Each little sleigh contained ten or twelve bodies, and as I looked out in the morning I could see the burial parties going out on duty. The white-sheeted corpses were packed closely together; and as the sleighs had no tailboards and were very small, the naked feet of the corpses projected out at the back in a horribly grotesque fashion. As the little vehicles, which were dragged by the fatigue squads, glided in ghostly silence over the frozen snow a long howl in the distance broke the stillness. This was taken up by another, and another, and another, until the voices of fully fifteen hundred famished dogs came through the crisp, clear wintry air with terrible significance, chilling the marrow of the listener as he watched the long procession of helpless, white-sheeted corpses moving slowly over the white-sheeted ground. A Parsee's obsequies, when the filthy vultures flap their wings and gather to the feast, must be an eerie sight; a Gussein's funeral in the Ganges, where the great flat-nosed alligators swarm expectantly, must stir even the sluggish imagination of the impassive Hindoo. But surely no man ever had more dreadful burial rites than were celebrated daily over hundreds of the dead inside the walls of Erzeroum, where the famished dogs disputed the possession of the poor mutilated remnants with sickening ferocity, and where the only prayers over the bodies of the dead were the muttered growls of the worrying pack. There is a short passage in "The Siege of Corinth" which exactly describes the grisly scene. Lord Byron wrote of Alp the renegade as he paced under the walls of Corinth these lines:
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh,
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed.
In this passage the poet has described with more detail than one cares to give in a plain narrative the scene which was enacted every morning in the early part of that month of January within the walls of Erzeroum.
It was about January 8 that I took the fever, which was by this time ravaging both the civil and military population. At first I tried to shake it off, and continued to walk about with aching head and quaking limbs in the hope that it might not have got a fair hold of me. On the second day I became quite stupid, though I still refused to go to bed, and on the evening of that day Pinkerton died.
Next morning we buried him. Wood was so difficult to get, that we were put to great straits to make a coffin for him; but at last we contrived one out of an old packing-case. Pinkerton was a very tall man, and the flimsy coffin was hardly big enough for the body. There was scarcely enough wood to make the lid fit properly. When we were making the preparations for the burial, I was myself nearly delirious with typhus, and almost the last thing that I can remember before going off altogether was the sight of the miserable coffin with a gaping crevice in the top, through which the end of poor Pinkerton's silky fair beard was protruding. Denniston notified Hakki Bey, the civil governor, of our loss; and an escort of soldiers came down and buried our comrade by the side of Dr. Guppy, who had died on duty in the same place before we arrived there. The burial service was read by the Rev. Mr. Cole, an American missionary, who was in Erzeroum, accompanied by his wife and family and by a young American lady, also engaged in missionary work among the Armenians. Then the soldiers fired a volley over the grave, and the career of the fine young army surgeon was closed.
When I was put to bed, the whole strength of the medical and assisting staff of the two English hospitals, Lord Blantyre's Hospital and that of the Stafford House Committee, was reduced to one man, namely, Dr. Denniston. Guppy and Pinkerton were dead, and Williams, Morisot, and myself were down with typhus. Under these circumstances, Denniston was left with the two hospitals full of patients to look after as well as us three at home, and he rose to the occasion most heroically.
Of course at that time I was unconscious of everything, but I found out afterwards what happened. Denniston handed the English hospital back to the Turkish administration which had managed it before our arrival, and he secured an assistant from the French consul to help him with the other one and with us. He told me afterwards that I made a very good patient, but I doubt it. I can just remember him coming in to see me one day and giving me a pill, which, though I was almost delirious, I made a great pretence of swallowing, but really kept it under my tongue and spat it out as soon as he had left the room!