In the Track of the Troops

by R. M. Ballantyne

Dismounting, we examined some of the cottages, and there beheld sights at the mere recollection of which I shudder. In one I saw women and children heaped together, with their limbs cut and garments torn off, while their long hair lay tossed about on the bloody floors. In another, which was on fire, I could see the limbs of corpses that were being roasted, or had already been burnt to cinders.

Not one soul in that village was left alive. How many had escaped we could not ascertain, for the wounded man had fallen into such a state of wild horror that he could not be got to understand or answer questions. At one cottage door which we came to he stood with clasped hands gazing at the dead inside, like one petrified. Some one touched him on the shoulder, when we were ready to leave the place, but he merely muttered, “My home!”

As we could do no good there, and were anxious to pursue the fiends who had left such desolation behind them, we again urged the man to come with us, but he refused. On our attempting to use gentle force, he started suddenly, drew a knife from his girdle, and plunging it into his heart, fell dead on his own threshold.

It was with a sense of relief, as if we had been delivered from a dark oppressive dungeon, that we galloped out of the village, and followed the tracks of the Bashi-Bazouks, which were luckily visible on the plain. Soon we traced them to a road that led towards the mountainous country. There was no other road there, and as this one had neither fork nor diverging path, we had no difficulty in following them up.

It was night, however, before we came upon further traces of them,—several fires where they had stopped to cook some food. As the sky was clear, we pushed on all that night.

Shortly after dawn we reached a sequestered dell. The road being curved at the place, we came on it suddenly, and here, under the bushes, we discovered the lair of the Bashi-Bazouks.

They kept no guard, apparently, but the sound of our approach had roused them, for, as we galloped into the dell, some were seen running to catch their horses, others, scarcely awake, were wildly buckling on their swords, while a few were creeping from under the low booths of brushwood they had set up to shelter them.

The scene that followed was brief but terrible. Our men, some of whom were lancers, some dragoons, charged them in all directions with yells of execration. Here I saw one wretch thrust through with a lance, doubling backward in his death-agony as he fell; there, another turned fiercely, and fired his pistol full at the dragoon who charged him, but missed, and was cleft next moment to the chin. In another place a wretched man had dropped on his knees, and, while in a supplicating attitude, was run through the neck by a lancer. But, to say truth, little quarter was asked by these Bashi-Bazouks, and none was granted. They fought on foot, fiercely, with spear and pistol and short sword. It seemed to me as if some of my conceptions of hell were being realised: rapid shots; fire and smoke; imprecations, shouts, and yells, with looks of fiercest passion and deadly hate; shrieks of mortal pain; blood spouting in thick fountains from sudden wounds; men lying in horrible, almost grotesque, contortions, or writhing on the ground in throes of agony.

“O God!” thought I, “and all this is done for the amelioration of the condition of the Christians in Turkey!”

“Ha! ha–a!” shouted a voice near me, as if in mockery of my thought. It was more like that of a fiend than a man. I turned quickly. It was André Yanovitch, his young and handsome face distorted with a look of furious triumph as he wiped his bloody sword after killing the last of the Bashi-Bazouks who had failed to escape into the neighbouring woods. “These brutes at least won’t have another chance of drawing blood from women and children,” he cried, sheathing his sword with a clang, and trotting towards his comrades, who were already mustering at the bottom of the dell, the skirmish being over.