When I was engaged in the administration of the Turkish Benevolent Fund., the raising of which was mainly due to the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the fact that I was bound upon an errand of mercy, and that I was instructed not to spare relief by any consideration of religion or race, enabled me to penetrate into parts of the disturbed districts into which I should not otherwise have dared to venture. In the course of my journey I came to Kalofer, where I found a singularly intelligent and attractive little Bulgarian boy whom I resolved to rescue from the almost certain starvation which lay before him. His father had been the Vakeel of the place and the child of course had been decently reared. He was pinched and pallid with hunger, and he had but a single garment, a pair of the baggy knickerbockers worn by the peasants of the district, which enveloped him from heel to shoulder. I got him decently attired, and in a while managed to place him in the care of a colleague in Constantinople, and when I left the country my brother-in-law, Captain William Thompson, who was engaged in the Levantine shipping trade, gave him a free passage to Liverpool, where for the space of some months he lived with my sisters, the younger of whom turned schoolmistress for his advantage, and began to teach him English. Mr Crummies used to wonder how things got into the papers, though perhaps he was under some slight suspicion of having contributed to their circulation. How the news of the young Bulgarian's arrival in England got there I do not know, but there was a considerable journalistic fuss about him, and the result was that a wealthy Bulgarian family, resident in Manchester, made overtures to my sister, and with my free consent, formally adopted the child. Before this happened he paid them a preliminary visit during which he was presented with a pony, and a male domestic was told off specially to his service. When his adoption was finally decided upon he went back to my sister's house in Liverpool to gather up his belongings and to say good-bye. The little ingrate refused to say one word of farewell to either of them. “I not English any longer,” he declared, “I Bulgar again,” and Bulgar through and through he was, to my thinking, sure enough. It is quite true that you can't indict a nation, but I shall need some persuasion before I go out of my way again to be of use to any member of that particular section of the human family.
CHAPTER XI
Retrospect—Return to London—Interview with Mr Gladstone at
Hawarden—Reminiscences.
The memories of that adventurous year in Turkey come thronging back so quickly that it is hard to choose amongst them. In the retrospect it looks as if it had been in the main a rather jolly sort of picnic, and at least there were streaks of splendid enjoyment in it Even our hardships made fun for us at times. I suppose you can know more about a man in a month if you go campaigning with him than you might find out in the course of years in a mere stay-at-home existence. Little generosities and selfishnesses display themselves more freely when commons are running short and shelter is scanty than they do amongst those who, in the phrase of Tennyson's northern farmer, “has coats to their backs, and takes their regular meals.” One British gentlemen we had with us during the siege of Plevna was a perpetual source of joy to me. He was a sort of human jackdaw, the picker-up of unconsidered trifles; and especially in the way of provender and of medical comforts he took care to be well provided whatever might befall the rest of us. It happened one day during the siege that some member of our party discovered in some huckster's shop in the village a couple of bottles of rum. He bore these triumphantly to the two-storeyed hut in which the greater number of us lived together, and that night we held a symposium. The liquor was vile stuff, but we set fire to it and burned most of the malice out of it. I made a ballad about that night a year or two later, and perhaps I may be forgiven if I quote a verse or two of it here. It gives at least a fair picture of the scene.
“Through ceaseless rain the rival cannon sounded
With sulky iteration boom on boom,
And while assailant and defender pounded
Each other with those epigrams of doom,
I sat at table, by my friends surrounded,
Where mirth and laughter lit the dingy room
And we made merry one and all, though dinner
Had failed for days, and we were growing thinner.
There, while that sulky iterated boom
Shook the thick air, our songs of home we sang;
And memory wrought for each on fancy's loom,
Unmoved, unshaken by War's clash and clang,
Some dreamy picture woven of light and gloom,
Of home and peace.”
Who shall forget that night who took a part in it?
The ceaseless downpour of the rain,
The incessant thundering of the guns,
The shells that ricochetted from the glacis
Or went howling overhead.
“We pushed the gourd about and jested hard,
Sang rattling songs, told many a rattling tale,—
A jest might keep the heart's deep floodgates barred.
Chant gaily, Pity! lest thy blood grow pale:
Bid every sprightly fancy stand at guard!
Be noisy, Mirth! lest all thy mirth should fail,
And yet, and yet our neighbour miseries
Would blur the sparkle in our hearts and eyes.
“For near at hand there lay such countless woes,
Such up-heaped horrors as no tongue can tell,
Where helpless Pity's ineffectual throes
Made that long shambles seem one ghastly hell,
And all the broken, battered, blood-stained rows
Of dead seem blessed in that they sleep so well;
Where the soul sickened and the heart grew faint
At scenes which Dante scarce had striven to paint.”
The rum was all drunk and the wine-gourds were all empty—the last song was sung and the last tale told, and we betook ourselves to rest. Our jackdaw friend, for economic reasons, had found a lodging elsewhere. He found it better to drop in upon the rest of us when there was anything special going than it would have been to forage for himself. By the time at which he left us, it had turned much colder, and the rain was freezing as it fell. The village streets were covered with a slippery verglas and here and there, where a siege shell had fallen, there was an embarrassing hole, not easily to be distinguished in the night-time from the merest puddle. There was scarcely a light agleam in the whole village, and it is not at all a thing to be surprised at that our jackdaw lost his way and had a stumble or two into the icy pools which beset him. He did succeed at last in finding the hut in which he lived, or rather, he found the site of it, for an 18 centimetre shell had burst there in his absence and the hut was not. We were making our apology for breakfast in the dusk before dawn when he returned to us. He was clothed in a thin armour of ice from head to foot and it trickled from him in little showers as he stood forlornly before us. The hardest heart must needs have pitied him, but it was he himself who gave the pathos of the show away. “Has nobody got a cup of tea?” he asked. “Tea,” cried Bond Moore, who had a special mis-liking for him, “tea, you———” (the blank may be filled in according to fancy, on the understanding that it was neither polite nor complimentary) “there's no tea within five hundred miles.” “Oh!” said the unhappy man, “I wish I had never come on this campaign, I do so miss my little comforts!” There was nobody there, I am sure, who would have been much shocked if, in the circumstances, our jackdaw had been even blasphemously profane. A man in his condition may say almost anything and may expect to be forgiven, but at this most inadequate bleat we yelled with laughter, and the poor jackdaw stood staring at us with eyes of suffering wonder for a full three minutes before we could rouse ourselves to attend to his necessities.
When I first went out to Turkey I was very much under the domination of Mr Gladstone's opinion. I was quite full of the unspeakable Turk and his wickednesses and was quite as anxious as the great Liberal statesman himself to see the “sick man” bundled out of Europe bag and baggage. But when I began to move about the country and to meet, as I was forced to do, men of all sorts and conditions among its native population, my sentiments with respect to the Turk underwent a thorough and rapid change. The real people, the men of the commercial and artisan classes and the rank and file of the army, are amongst the best people I have ever known. Their religion enjoins them to sobriety, and as a race they are brave, truthful and kindly, and I never met one authentic instance in which an act of cruelty was chargeable to the men of the regular forces. The hordes of Bashi-Bazouks, of Smyrniotes and Tripolites were of course a set of most unspeakable ruffians, and there are probably no more deplorable specimens of human nature in the world than are to be found among the Paris-bred spawn of the harem.
Almost immediately on my return to London I lunched with Canon Liddon of St Paul's. Our talk naturally turned upon the campaign, and in the course of it I gave him an account of the affair at Guemlik, as being typical of whatever disturbances had taken place between the citizen Turk and the Bulgarians. When General Gourko first broke into the great plain south of the Balkans with his Cossack advance guard, the Christian population rose rejoicingly to receive them and persuaded themselves without difficulty that the rule of their Mahommedan masters was dead and done with then and there. They were supplied with arms and were urged to revolt. There is no doubt whatever that they had a great deal to complain of. They had been under the heel of official oppression for centuries, although in that respect they were not much worse off than their Mahommedan neighbours, but they were a despised and abject race who ate forbidden food and who lived in an almost inconceivable condition of personal uncleanness. To the Turkish peasant dirt is anathema maranatha; in his own station of life he is the cleanest man in the world, and if there is any dirtier person to be found than a Bulgarian peasant, as I knew him in the war year, I can only say that I have not yet discovered him. The Christian population (God save the mark!) were forbidden by law to bear arms, and they were cowards by tradition. Villagers of the two races lived peacefully enough together, though there was an open disdain on the one side always and a smouldering hatred on the other.
It befell that in a neighbouring village the Bulgarians broke into revolution, and all the able-bodied Turks in Guemlik sallied out to the assistance of their countrymen, leaving only a few infirm old men and the women and children. The Guemlik Christians, being persuaded that the fighting force would never return, rose en masse and put every Turkish soul to death. The massacre was characterised by a terrible ferocity; the bodies of the dead were hideously mutilated and were all hurled pell-mell into the well at the Turkish end of the village, and all the houses of that quarter were looted and burned down. Contrary to the expectations of the victors, the Turkish residents returned triumphant. They took their revenge; they put the Christians to the sword, fired the Christian houses, and filled up the Christian well with corpses. The account was quite equally balanced, but it is certain that the Bulgarians made the first move in the game. It was so everywhere, so far as my experience went, wherever the citizen Turk was drawn into the conflict Nothing viler than the conduct of the Government in letting loose its vast hordes of irregular soldiery with license to slay and pillage an unarmed population could possibly be conceived. But what I was concerned to prove was that the Mahommedan villagers had no part or lot in the cruelties of that time unless by way of stern reprisal.