There is a Turkish proverb, “Though your enemy be as small as an ant, yet act as if he were as big as an elephant.” Had the Russians been guided by this, they might have saved many losses.
“One bitterly cold morning, with two feet of snow on the ground, I joined a detachment of prisoners, escorted by Roumanians. We travelled viâ Sistoon to Bukarest, crossing the Danube by the Russian pontoon bridge. This journey, which lasted eight days, was the most dreadful part of my experience, lying as it did through snow-clad country, with storms and bitter winds. I and fifty others had seats on carts; the bulk of the prisoners had to tramp. I saw at least 400 men drop, to be taken as little notice of as if they were so much offal, to die of starvation, or be devoured by the wolves which prowled around our column.
“Over each man who fell a hideous crowd of crows, ravens, vultures, hovered until he was exhausted enough to be attacked with impunity.
“Some of the soldiers of the escort were extremely brutal; others displayed a touching kindness; most were as stolid and apathetic as their captives. Of Osman’s army of 48,000 men, only 15,000 reached Russian soil; only 12,000 returned to their homes.
“In Bukarest our sufferings were at an end. In the streets ladies distributed coffee, broth, bread, tobacco, cigarettes, spirit. Our quarters in the barracks appeared to us like Paradise.”
Then by train to Kharkoff, where Herbert got a cheque from his father, and was allowed much freedom on parole; he made many friends, was lionized and feasted and fattened “like a show beast.” “I was treated,” he says, “with all the chivalrous kindness and open-handed hospitality which are the characteristics of the educated Russians. The effects of the brutal propensities developed in warfare wore off speedily, and I am now a mild and inoffensive being, whose conscience does not allow the killing of a flea or the plucking of a flower!”
From “The Defence of Plevna,” by W. V. Herbert, 1895, by kind permission of Messrs. Longmans, Green and Co.