THE PRELIMINARIES TO THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR.
Prince Czetwertinski--A Romantic Career--His First Commission--A
Retrospect--The History of a Noble Pole--From Monte Carlo to
Brisbane--A Prince as a Deck Hand on a Schooner--A Bush
Tutor--He returns to Europe--The Load of Poverty--Lighter to
Bear in Australia--A Big Win at Flemington--School Teaching in
Batavia--Back to New South Wales--Death at Wagga--The Vale of
Moravia--The Hot Spring--Bulgarian Blanchisseuses--Slavonian
Folk-songs--How the Turks sing--A Bulgarian Sámadh--Foley's
End--Infuriated Scavengers--A Mysterious
Disturbance--Rough-and-tumble Fighting--A Turkish
Hercules--Capturing a Prisoner--A Solitary Ride--A Bulgarian
Farrier--Back to Sofia--Christmas in the Snow--A Maize Cob for a
Christmas Dinner--Orkhanieh to Sofia--A Doctor frozen to
Death--Bitter Experiences--Salutary Effects of a Good Dinner.
At Nish I first met a young soldier whose remarkable personality and
singularly adventurous life could not fail to attract attention, and
with whom I formed a close personal friendship, which was only ended by
his death barely a year ago. Prince Czetwertinski, whom I first saw
mounted on a magnificent black charger in the main street of Nish,
belonged to one of the oldest families in Russian Poland, and was
himself the head of the family. His mother had been living at Lemberg
in Galicia, and the young prince had been educated in France, and
afterwards at a military school in Prague, with the object of entering
the Austrian army. At the last moment, however, the Russian Government
intervened, deeming it unwise to allow a Polish prince, who, though a
Russian subject, was as hostile at heart to Russia as were all his
countrymen, to accept an Austrian commission. The official world of St.
Petersburg set its face against Czetwertinski, and refused to furnish
him with the necessary papers; so that when the Servian war broke out he
gladly seized the chance of taking service against the Russians, the
traditional foes of his Polish house, proud still, although its glories
had been sadly tarnished.
Young Czetwertinski was well received at the court of the Emperor of
Austria, and was admitted to the intimacy of Prince Metternich; but
there were grave difficulties in the way of the military career upon
which he had set his heart. At last, however, through the kind offices
of General Klapka, the well known Hungarian general, who was on friendly
terms with the Turkish Government, the young prince secured an entrance
to military life, and was appointed, not to a commission, but to the
grade of private in a Turkish cavalry regiment, in which capacity he had
at first to perform the most menial offices. When Alexinatz was taken
in October, 1876, it was Czetwertinski who brought the news to Nish; and
for his conduct in the engagement he received a captaincy, and also the
decoration of the fifth order of the Medjidie. He was a magnificent
rider, and his victory over a vicious black stallion that no one in the
regiment could sit was a good passport to the affections of the Turks,
who dearly love fine horsemanship. I met him afterwards at Widdin, and
got to know him intimately. At that time he was captain of a guard of
eighty troopers attached to the person of Osman Pasha; and the colonel
of his regiment, a man named Mustapha Bey, was himself a Pole, who had
fled to Turkey as a boy, entered the Turkish service, and become a
Mohammedan. Czetwertinski fell ill at Plevna of dysentery, and passed
through my hands, afterwards coming to live with me in the Bulgarian
house where I was quartered, and bringing his servant Faizi with him. As
the young cavalry officer was attached to the person of Osman Pasha, I
was kept _au courant_ with all that was going on; and it was through him
that I was enabled chiefly to know and admire the courage, the honour,
the high military ability, and the pure patriotism of the great chief
under whom we both served.
Czetwertinski fought with signal bravery in all the engagements that
took place at Plevna, and on one occasion had his horse killed under
him at Pelischat--the famous black stallion that none but he could ride.
He was afterwards selected for his knowledge of French to act as
_parlementaire_, and visited the Russian headquarters in that capacity
with Tewfik Pasha. Before I left Plevna, Czetwertinski was sick and
wounded; so I sent him down invalided to Constantinople together with
Victor Lauri, a German artist, who had chummed in with us on the field.
Had Czetwertinski been left behind at Plevna, he would infallibly have
been shot by the Russians for a deserter, as Skobeleff himself, who met
him at a dinner party after the war was over, assured him.
I said good-bye to Prince Czetwertinski, or, as he used to call himself,
Mehemet Bey, at Constantinople, and lost sight of him, as I thought, for
ever; but years afterwards--it was in 1884--I found a note at my house
in Melbourne saying that Mehemet Bey would call back in half an hour. I
waited to see him, and then he told me his story.
It seemed that he owned some villages near Odessa; but when they were
confiscated by the Russian Government upon the termination of the war,
he went to live with his mother at Lemberg in Galicia. However, after
the exciting scenes amongst which he had lived, the dreary life of the
provincial Galician capital was intolerable to him, especially as the
small revenue still left to the family was miserably inadequate to
support the position of a prince. Accordingly Czetwertinski, who was
always an inveterate gambler, scraped together about £3,000 and made for
Monte Carlo, with the hope of breaking the bank and restoring his fallen
fortunes. In three days at the tables he had lost all but £25; and
knowing that I was somewhere in Australia, he went over to London, and
took a steerage passage in an emigrant vessel bound for Brisbane. His
fellow passengers were such a rough lot that he would not associate with
them, and consequently he learned not a word of English during the
voyage, eventually landing at Brisbane with one solitary shilling in his
pocket. He walked the streets of Brisbane for the first night, nearly
starving, and towards morning heard a man speaking a few words of French
to another. Czetwertinski went up to him, and found that the man was
really a Frenchman--he turned out afterwards to be an escaped communard
from New Caledonia--and that he owned a small ten-ton cutter, with which
he plied up the coast, carrying provisions to the northern squatters and
planters. Czetwertinski took a billet as deck hand to the escaped
convict trader, working for his tucker alone; but during his three
months' service on board he amassed capital in a sense, for he learned
English. His next step was from the deck of the cutter to the
schoolroom of a station, where he secured an engagement as tutor in a
squatter's family, who little guessed that the quiet Mr. Jules who
explained the irregular French verbs to them with exemplary patience was
Prince Czetwertinski, the dashing light cavalryman who made his mark at
the taking of Alexinatz a few years before.
Meanwhile his mother in distant Lemberg was searching Europe high and
low for her missing son, and at last she confided the story of his
disappearance to the Jesuits, by whom he had been brought up as a child.
Setting the machinery of their vast religious organization to work, the
Jesuit fathers in Galicia sent inquiries flying through the
ramifications of their order in all quarters of the globe, and at last
their brethren in Sydney discovered the wanderer, and placed him once
more in communication with his family. They also offered him a post as
master in a Jesuit college near Parramatta, and it was during a holiday
from his duties there that he came down to Melbourne to see me. His
mother longed for him to go home again, and sent him out money,
imploring him to return to Europe, which he did soon after I saw him. I
had letters from him afterwards, in which he told me that he had resumed
his title of prince, and was living in Rome with his uncle, who was a
cardinal. He had a special audience with his Holiness the Pope, who took
a warm interest in him.
With revenues depleted by continual confiscations, Czetwertinski found
himself unable for long to support the social position which he was
called upon to fill in Europe, and he accordingly returned to Australia,
and for three years held a post as master at St. Xavier's College, near
Melbourne. I heard that he was a good teacher, but very harsh with the
boys. When he left the school, I got him a post as tutor to the son of a
friend of mine at a good salary; but when he had been there a week,
there was a race meeting at Flemington, and he got a holiday to come
down to town. Now Czetwertinski, though a magnificent rider, knew
nothing about racing; but he tackled the ring with the same gay audacity
as the tables at Monte Carlo, and with £7 in his pocket commenced a
plunge in cash betting. His luck was in this time, and he backed winner
after winner, leaving off at the end of the day £300 to the good. Two
days afterwards I heard from him that he had thrown up his billet, and
was leaving that night for Sydney, _en route_ for Bagdad or Havana! I
surmised that he would find his way back to Europe, and eventually marry
an American heiress with £20,000 a year, with whom his mother had
arranged a _mariage de convenance_ for him, with a promise that £500,000
should be settled upon him on the day of the wedding. As a matter of
fact, however, he got no farther than Batavia, where he opened a
school, which was a failure. He worked his way back to Cooktown, and
thence in a state of starvation to Sydney. On one occasion a butcher's
wife, who wanted to engage a tutor, came across him in a registry
office, and explained to him that it was usual for people in her country
to wear collars. The poor wandering prince had no collar, so he lost the
billet. However, he eventually made his way down to Wagga, where he
opened a school, which turned out very successfully. He was doing
splendidly, and meditating another trip home, when he caught a chill,
and died in a week of pneumonia. A Wagga man brought me down poor
Czetwertinski's final good-bye, saying that he thought of me to the
last. So died as noble, brave, and high-spirited a soldier as ever drew
the sword.
Nish, which is close to the Servian border, is one of the most
flourishing towns in Bulgaria, and it was at that time fortified by
several large forts and earthworks. Many of the houses were extremely
handsome, and the villa in which we were quartered was a beautiful
residence. A fine Bulgarian church and several Turkish mosques lent
stateliness and dignity to the little city that nestles in the valley of
the river Moravia. In the evening, as we sat over our cigarettes after
dinner, there was a quiet restfulness in the beauty of the landscape
that had a special charm; and when my comrades asked me to sing, I
would give them that sweet old song, "Sweet Vale of Avoca, how calm
could I rest," altering it to local circumstances by substituting
"Moravia" for "Avoca."
Routine comes to mould a man's daily life in the Balkans as well as in
London or Paris, and before many days had passed we had settled down to
very regular habits. After breakfast at eight o'clock, a walk of half a
mile took us to the general hospital, where we had a couple of hundred
wounded men under treatment; and after going our rounds, and conferring
with the head of the hospital about any matters demanding immediate
attention, we were practically free by one o'clock for the rest of the
day. One day a week was set apart for operations; but on the other days
we used to go out riding in the hills and to the surrounding Bulgarian
villages, with an occasional coursing match--for hares were very
plentiful--by way of keeping our sporting proclivities properly
exercised. A very favourite trip was a ride of seven miles out to a
famous hot mineral spring, where the water, strongly impregnated with
sulphur and chalybeates, gushes out of the living rock in a stream over
a foot in diameter at a temperature of 120° Fahr., and falls into a
natural basin, largely resorted to by the residents as a bath. Close to
this bath, as the afternoon wore on, the deep-bosomed, dark-eyed
Bulgarian women would bring the clothing of their households to wash,
as Nausĭcaa and her maidens used to do long ago in the fabled land of
Phæācia, where Odysseus, shipwrecked on his homeward voyage from Ilium,
was saved from the sea. The Bulgarians, like their cousins-german the
Servians and Roumanians, are fond of bright colours, particularly the
women. Darwin throws the cold light of science on the important subject
of feminine attire, when he points out that the gorgeous plumage of
certain birds has been developed by them as a special sex attraction to
secure for them the notice of a mate. With birds and animals, however,
it is almost invariably the male who decks himself out in the most
brilliant colouring, hoping thereby to make himself the cynosure of all
the eyes of the females; but in the human species, by a curious piece of
satire, Nature seems to encourage the female to adopt this gentle art.
At any rate the Bulgarian women were adepts at it; and in spite of their
Finnish type of features, many of them looked positively pretty as they
stooped over the pool in their short, white kirtles of homespun frieze
and loose-sleeved scarlet bodices, making a bright note of colour in the
picture. And as they dipped their garments in the steaming washtub of
Nature's own brewing, these rustic _blanchisseuses de fin_ would sing
the plaintive folk-songs of their country in the smooth Slavonian
tongue, which had come to them in the old migratory days, during their
long residence on the Volga, before the Avars swooped down upon them
and drove them across the Danube to the country under the shadow of the
Balkans, where they have remained ever since. In the Bulgarian
folk-songs, with their plaintive semitones and their melodies sliding
away invariably into the mournful minor, one seemed to hear the echoes
of the history of the people who have degenerated from the warlike race
that crossed the Danube under their great chief Zabergan in the sixth
century to the feeble and lethargic tillers of the soil, who have grown
up under their long subjection to the great Byzantine Empire with its
seat of government at Constantinople, and afterwards to the despotic
Turkish power which superseded it.
As the evening drew in we would race our horses back across country to
Nish, haunted by the recollections of those plaintive Bulgarian airs and
of the low, rich voices of the dark-eyed singers. The Turk, though an
excellent fellow in many respects, has peculiar notions in the matter of
voice production, and to hear a group of them all singing in unison
through their noses as they squatted on the ground round a camp-fire was
an experience to which one had to get accustomed before one could
thoroughly enjoy it. It was a pleasant variety to exchange the nasal
tenor squeak of the Turkish Tommy Atkins for the soft contralto of a
Bulgarian _blanchisseuse_.
One of the principal sights of Nish is a squarely built brick tower
covered over with plaster, in which are set three thousand Servian
skulls. This ghastly trophy, which is about fifty years old, celebrates
a long forgotten victory. The heads were stuck there freshly shorn from
the shoulders of the Servians, and the whole grim monument reminds one
of those _sámadhs_, or cenotaphs of heads, of which Kipling gives such a
vivid description in one of his "Departmental Ditties."
Our party was joined at Nish by a son of the Duke of Cambridge, Colonel
FitzGeorge, and a Captain James, who had come over with him from Widdin.
I bought a capital grey pony from James for £8, and I always fancy that
he imagined I had got at him over the bargain. However, _caveat emptor_
is an admirable maxim in horse-dealing; and the law presumably imagines
the vendor capable of looking after himself, as no maxim has been framed
for his guidance. At any rate the grey pony stood me in good stead; and
in our nightly race home from the mineral spring, or the particular
Bulgarian village which we happened to be patronizing with a visit, I
generally finished in the first three. It was a flat race of course, for
you can walk from one end of the country to the other without meeting a
fence of any kind.
At night after dinner the entire British medical staff at Nish,
supported by FitzGeorge and James, were in the habit of discussing the
Eastern Question in all its bearings, not from the outside point of view
of the unprejudiced observer, but with the keenness of people who felt
that they had a close personal interest in the solution of the problem.
There were not wanting alarmists, who took the cheerful view that, if
disaster overtook the Turkish arms, the exasperated Turks would turn
their swords against the Giaours in their own ranks, and we should all
get our throats cut for our pains.
One of the speakers who invariably ranged himself on the side of the
minority in these discussions, and whose chief delight it was to be the
Ishmael of debate with his hand against every man and every man's hand
against him, was an extraordinary man named Foley, who quarrelled
violently with every one of us except, I think, myself. Afterwards, just
before the Russian war broke out, the poor fellow met a tragic end. He
was quartered near Sistova in a Bulgarian house on the bank of the
Danube, and it was found one morning that he had disappeared. His fate
was a mystery which was never cleared up; and whether he drowned himself
in the Danube, or was knocked on the head by some wandering Circassians,
we were never able to find out. Another of my comrades at Nish was Ralph
Leslie, a Canadian, who has had a fairly adventurous career, and was
afterwards with Stanley on the Congo. He was a nice young fellow; but he
used to read _Gil Blas_ to me in French when I was in bed at night and
required all my energies to circumvent the strategy of the Bulgarian
insects.
An incident occurred one afternoon which came near terminating seriously
for some of us, and it forms a good illustration of the dangers which
the travelling Briton incurs as often as not through his own
pig-headedness. S---- and I, with three or four more of the medical
staff, were walking down the main street in plain clothes after lunch,
when we noticed half a dozen Turkish soldiers engaged in cleaning the
street. They were scooping up the liquid mud in great shovels, and
throwing it into a cart drawn up near the footpath. A good share of
every shovelful of mud came down on the footway, and as we approached
S---- shouted to them in English to "knock off" whilst we went past.
They either did not or would not understand, and before we had gone
three steps farther my companion's Bond Street tweed suit received a
liberal baptism of black mud from the shovel wielded by a dour old Turk,
the ugliest of the party. S---- lost his temper, and sent in a heavy
left-hander, which caught the old fellow on the point of the jaw, and
landed him kicking on his back in the middle of the road. The whole
gang at once raised a yell, and rushed us with their shovels, while we
had to rely upon our fists alone for our defence. Matters were beginning
to look very ugly indeed, when a Turkish lieutenant who knew us rushed
up, and drawing his sword interposed himself between ourselves and our
assailants, who retired in disorder under a vigorous volley of Turkish
maledictions. It was a close thing for us all the same, and the
adventurous career which I had marked out before me came perilously near
to being abruptly terminated by an inglorious end at the hands of an
infuriated scavenger.
But this same S----, capable man as he was at his profession and
good-hearted fellow to boot, had an unhappy knack of getting into
difficulties, and his death resulted eventually as an indirect
consequence of a mysterious quarrel which he had with a Turkish major
under circumstances which I recollect with great distinctness. While we
were at Nish, one of the British surgeons attached to the general
hospital, Howard Keen by name, was quartered in a fine Bulgarian house,
which he shared with a Turkish major, whose name it is not necessary to
mention. S---- and I went up to spend the evening with them; and as it
was a bitterly cold night with snow on the ground outside, Keen advised
me to stop with him, and camp in his half of the house, which I did. At
about twelve o'clock I wrapped myself in my heavy military overcoat
lined with wolf-skin, and lay down to sleep on the floor in front of the
fire in Keen's room, while Keen also went to sleep on his camp-bed. We
left S---- and the Turkish major drinking _raki_ together in the major's
room at the other side of the house.
As the fire was burning low I woke with a start to find the Bulgarian
owner of the house standing over me in a state of violent agitation,
gesticulating wildly and repeating again and again some words of the
meaning of which I had not the faintest notion. He was holding in his
hand a revolver which belonged to S----. I guessed at once that
something was wrong; and fearing that S---- had got the worse for liquor
and insulted the Bulgarian's wife, I woke Keen, who ran out in his shirt
and trousers to the other side of the house. I followed him almost
immediately, and he yelled out to me to come to the major's quarters at
once. I rushed in, and found the major in a state of tremendous
excitement, chewing his big black moustache and hurriedly buckling on
his sword. Guessing that S---- had got into trouble again, I sang out to
him to clear out; but as I did so the door opened, and in he walked as
white as a sheet. The major drew his revolver, and fired at S----
point-blank, but the bullet missed its mark; and before he could pull
the trigger again, Keen and I had closed with him, and for about two
minutes the inside of that Bulgarian's sitting-room was about the
hottest corner I have ever been in. The Turk was a big, powerful fellow,
and he was mad with raki; while Keen and I were both tough, and in
pretty good form. Over and over on the floor we rolled, the Turk trying
to throttle us, while we hung to him like a couple of bull-terriers, and
gradually wore him out. At last we had him fairly beaten, and, grabbing
his revolver, we blew out the light and fled, taking S---- with us, and
locking the door behind us. S---- staggered off to his own quarters; but
when the morning came, he was found lying in the snow outside his own
door, and the exposure brought on an attack of inflammation of the
lungs, from which he eventually died. In the morning we tried in vain to
find out the cause of the quarrel; but neither S---- nor the major would
tell us. I think the Bulgarian knew, but he kept his own counsel.
One night in Nish I met a very remarkable Turkish officer named Ahmet
Bey, who was introduced to me as a man who had killed seven Servians
with his own sword during the final attack upon Alexinatz. I never in my
life saw a man with such a magnificent physique. He was very handsome,
splendidly proportioned, and of astounding physical strength. A few days
before I met him he had been the hero of a feat about which all the
troops in Nish were still talking. It seemed that Abdul Kerim Pasha,
the commander-in-chief, while inspecting the troops one morning,
casually expressed a wish that he could capture a Servian prisoner from
the Servian lines. Ahmet Bey, who overheard the remark, rode up, and,
saluting, asked to be permitted to get the commander a prisoner. Abdul
Kerim wonderingly gave the required permission, and Ahmet Bey without
another word wheeled his charger, dashed the spurs into his flanks, and
galloped off in front of the astonished detachment straight for the
nearest Servian outpost. As he approached the Servian lines half a dozen
rifles cracked, for the Servian vedettes opened fire upon him, hoping to
drop him on the wing. But Ahmet Bey galloped on unharmed, having
deliberately marked down one sentry for his prey. The sentry emptied his
rifle at the audacious horseman in vain, and too late started to run.
Ahmet Bey swooped down on him like a sparrow-hawk upon a landrail, and
bending down grasped the man by the collar in an iron grip and flung him
without an effort across the saddle in front of him. Then he galloped
back again, bending over his horse's neck as the bullets whistled over
his head, and delivered his bewildered prisoner to the Turkish commander
amid the delighted shouts of the whole detachment.
The hero of this extraordinary feat was afterwards attached to the
staff of Mehemet Ali Pasha, in command of the army of the Lom. With the
same army corps was Baker Pasha, the famous Colonel Baker, who was
accounted one of the finest cavalry leaders in Europe; and Baker Pasha,
who should be a good judge of soldierly qualities, has left it on record
that Ahmet Bey was the beau-ideal of a soldier. Baker Pasha has given it
as his written opinion that he never met the equal of this Turkish
officer in instinctive military knowledge. He seemed to be able to
divine the movements of the enemy and forestall every change of position
or modification of strategy.
The frequent defeats of the Servians seemed to indicate a speedy
termination of hostilities; and had it not been for the thousands of
Russian volunteers who flocked to the Servian standard and took service
under the Russian General Tchernaieff, who commanded the Servian army,
it was evident that the resistance of Servia must have collapsed much
earlier. At last, when Servia appealed to the Powers to stop the war and
an armistice was declared at the instance of Russia, a large number of
Turkish troops were sent to the rear, and among them was my regiment the
Kyrchehir. We were ordered to retire to Sofia, and of course I had to
sever my connection with the general hospital and rejoin my regiment.
It was December. The sky was the colour of lead, and the snow lay with a
dead weight upon the pine trees. The regiment started early in the
morning, and when I left for the long, solitary ride to Sofia I was
several hours behind my troops. As I cantered my grey pony over the
frozen ground a mishap befell me at the outset, for the gallant little
animal cast a shoe, and I had to stop at a Bulgarian village to get him
shod. Throughout the Turkish Empire they use flat plates which cover the
whole of the foot with the exception of a small round orifice in the
centre, instead of the crescent-shaped horseshoes which have come down
to more civilized countries from the Roman times, and I had to hunt up a
farrier to do the work. I found him at last, a surly, black-bearded
fellow, who gave free vent to his hatred of the Turkish troops, and
flatly refused to assist me. Out came my revolver; and as I tapped the
barrel, significantly pointing first to the shoeless hoof and then to
the farrier's head, he came to terms and consented. But when I remounted
the grey, I found that he was dead lame. The rascally farrier, I
discovered afterwards, had driven a long nail straight into the frog of
the unfortunate pony's foot, and then nailed the plate on over it.
Before I reached Sofia a Circassian stole my English stirrup-irons while
I slept, and leading my lame pony I finished the journey on foot.
However, we were a very jolly party at Sofia, where a fresh lot of
English surgeons chummed in with us, and we all resolved to celebrate
Christmas in the proper English way by a splendid dinner. On Christmas
Eve a special sub-committee was formed to arrange the details of a
banquet which should be worthy of the occasion. We were going to have no
more of the eternal pilaf, with its accompanying hard biscuit and gulps
of hot black coffee, but a real hot joint, a turkey, a goose, a plum
pudding, and plenty of wine. I went to sleep that night with my soul
filled with beautiful dreams of Christmas, and peace on earth, goodwill
towards Bulgarians, and of roast turkey and celery sauce. In the morning
I woke, and learned with horror that the regiment was ordered to march
at once to the bleak, detestable pass of Orkhanieh in the Balkans, and
that we should probably get no dinner at all. They went away without me,
and as Christmas morning wore on I came to the conclusion that I had
better follow them or else I might get lost. I did follow them, but I
got lost all the same; and after riding until ten o'clock at night I
reached a filthy Bulgarian village, and decided to camp there. The house
which I selected as the most promising was about as clean as an English
piggery; but I found a kind of loft where maize was stored in the cob,
and there I stopped for the night. I lay on the cobs of maize which were
as hard as paving-stones, and made my Christmas dinner off one of them,
hardly knowing whether to curse or laugh at the irony of fate and the
"happy Christmas" which my friends in England and Australia no doubt
were wishing me. Next day I overtook the regiment, and went into
quarters with it for five weeks at Orkhanieh. I had plenty to do there,
for the men suffered greatly from dysentery; and as they could not all
be accommodated in the village, they had to live under canvas, a mode of
life which was very severe at that time of the year. After a few weeks
there my stock of medicines, which was never very large, began to run
out, and I got permission from the colonel to ride into Sofia, a
distance of thirty miles, to replenish the regimental medicine chest.
Of all my campaigning experiences none were more awful than those lonely
rides from Orkhanieh to Sofia and back again. My horse went lame soon
after I started, the cold was intense, and in half an hour I was
overtaken by a snowstorm which nearly blinded me. All day my poor horse
hobbled along on three legs, while I was afraid to dismount, knowing
that if I once left the saddle I should be frozen to death on the
ground. When I arrived in Sofia at ten o'clock that night, I had to be
lifted off my horse and put to bed. In the morning my good horse was
found dead in the stable, killed by that fearful journey. An Italian
doctor, who drove into Sofia on the same day, was lifted out of the
vehicle dead. Perhaps if he had ridden he might have been saved.
After a rest of two days, I had to start back for Orkhanieh with my
replenished medicine chest. The prospect was not a pleasant one; but I
faced it with a fresh horse and renewed confidence. Before I had gone
half-way I missed the road, and going across country came to a frozen
river, which I was afraid to cross, lest the ice might give way and let
me and my horse through into deep water. Accordingly I rode along the
bank until I came to a place where I judged from the colour of the ice
that the water was shallow, and there I resolved to attempt the
crossing. When I was in the middle, there was a crack like a pistol
shot, the ice broke, and we fell through to the river-bed, my horse
standing up to his shoulder in the icy water, which reached to my knee.
I was off his back in a moment, and the poor brute, after a couple of
frightened plunges, stood still shivering. It was plain that the ice
would not bear us, even if I could get myself and the horse to the
surface again, so the only course open was to cut a way out. I took my
two heavy stirrup-irons, fixed them on one leather, and, using this
improvised implement as a hammer, broke away the ice piecemeal, and
dragged myself and my horse up the bank on the opposite side. At last I
reached the camp, as stiff as though I was encased in plaster of Paris,
and with my clothes frozen hard to my body. It was three weeks before I
properly recovered sensation in my bridle-hand.
The regiment was ordered to Widdin before I had recovered from that last
ride, and on the eve of our departure I had a severe attack of
dysentery, which weakened me terribly. However, they lifted me on to my
horse, and at last we reached the town of Vratza, one of the most
picturesque towns in Bulgaria. Here I found the Turkish regiment to
which my friend Stiven was attached; and to my great joy almost the
first man whom I met was Stiven, who was living in the house of a Polish
apothecary. I was very weak and ill; but I accepted Stiven's invitation
to dine, and he prescribed a nourishing diet with plenty of good
blood-making wine. What is more, he saw that I had it; and my
performances at that dinner, which was the first European meal I had
eaten since leaving Sofia, made our Turkish servant open his eyes. I am
afraid to think how many bottles of the wine of the country Stiven and I
got through between us; but I know that, when at last I tumbled off to
bed in the mosque where the regiment was quartered, I slept the deep
sleep of those who have dined both wisely and too well. It was a good
prescription of Stiven's, and next day I was completely restored in
health.