Anon the Lancers, finding their weapons useless at such close quarters, slung them, and smote heavily on every side with their keen bright swords. Long and hard was the fight, and for a time the mingling masses were too closely wedged in some places to use even their swords, and grappled with each other, while the entangled chargers, enraged and frightened, reared, plunged, struck out and brained or trampled into gore the dead and wounded.
Here it was the volunteer saved the general and his faithful aide-de-camp, covering them as they struggled back, faint and breathless, out of the débris; thrusting with his lance till it snapped in two, and then hacking his way out with the sword; and it was only after it was all over, and he came afoot out of the field, dazed in aspect, with teeth set, eyes dilated and glaring with the fierce fever of battle, and clutching a sword, the blade and hilt of which were literally covered with blood, that he fairly knew what he had done, and the burst seams of his uniform showed all how well he had plied his weapon that day.
Thirstily and gratefully he took a draught from a tin canteen of Negotin wine, which a passing sutler gave him.
Cecil Falconer, for the volunteer was he, though in that blood-stained foreign uniform few would have recognised the once fashionable Cameronian officer, was sorely changed in aspect. He was browner visaged, bearded to the eyes, yet his face was worn and lined, and his eyes seemed sunk and keen, with the wolfish expression worn by those of men who are daily facing peril and death.
As a volunteer, he wore the uniform of a private—a brown tunic faced with scarlet, crimson pantaloons, now covered with blood and mud, and a grey cloth cap, not unlike the Scottish glengarry. Fighting in a cause for which—and in that of a prince for whom—he cared nothing; fighting in battle as a weaker spirit might have betaken itself to alcohol to drown the past and give oblivion to the present, poor Cecil had found his way to Servia, and had that day done wonders, setting little store on the lives of those he fought against—the barbarous and brutal Turks—and certainly none whatever on his own life.
Refused a commission in the service by the Servian minister of war—for, by the influence of long conquest, there is much of the Ottoman in the character of the Servian people, who are fatalists, and as distrustful of all strangers as a John Bull of the last century—he had joined 'Tchernaieff's Own' as a volunteer trooper, and on that day by the Morava had won his commission, and the cross of the Takovo; but what a mockery they were to him, and how little he cared about them!
Since joining in the humble and apparently hopeless capacity he had taken, he had undergone all the perils and miseries of the Servian campaign; had been compelled to consort, at times, with fierce and lawless comrades, who were most repugnant to his refined nature; he had been generous to all with his money, when he had any, which was not often now; he had nursed the wounded, buried the dead, and won golden opinions from all; he had groomed his own horse and the horses of others; had to hew wood, to cook coarse rations, when there were any to cook; slept on the bare earth in the rain and the storm, or sharing a tente-d'abri when one could be got, and sharing it with a comrade—some unsavoury and unwashed Servian trooper, whose vicinity was, in itself, a horror.
As most people know, but a very short time ago the Christians in Bosnia and elsewhere took arms against their oppressors, the Turks, who were unable to suppress the insurrection, and soon after the disturbance was intensified by a declaration of war against the Porte by Prince Milano Obrenovitch of Servia, who, by his army, was proclaimed King of Bosnia, and whose father, the alleged slayer of the famous Cerni Georges, began life as a cattle-driver, and first distinguished himself in battle so far back as 1807. Born in 1854, Prince Milano succeeded Michail III. (who was assassinated); and as the new war spread into Bulgaria, as we all know, it took the form of atrocities unparalleled in modern Europe, unless we except the Cromwellians at Wexford and the Williamites at Glencoe. The villages of the Christians were plundered and given to the flames; their male inhabitants slain without mercy, under nameless tortures; women and girls carried off to slavery. The dead lay heaped in the churches to which they had fled for shelter, and dogs and hungry kites tore their flesh as they lay unburied by the wayside.
And now it was within forty British miles of that Bulgaria, where so much wild work was being done, that on the evening of the 28th of September, after Tchernaieff had crossed to the left bank of the Morava below Boboviste, and fought one of the greatest battles in the Servian war—a battle in which Prince Milan lost 3000 men, killed and wounded, while the Russians lost in proportion, and had sixty dead officers on the field—a battle in which the explosion of seven Turkish powder-caissons added to the horror and slaughter—that Cecil Falconer found himself warmly complimented, and again and again shaken by the hand, by old Tchernaieff, as the saviour of himself and his favourite aide-de-camp, Palenka.
'We shall never forget your services and your bravery this day!' said the latter—a pleasing and handsome man—in French.