A BELEAGUERED CITY.
The Scourge of Typhus--Pyæmia and Pneumonia--Terrible
Cold--Outposts frozen to Death--Fall of Kars--The March of the
Wounded--One Hundred and Eighty Miles over the Snow--Ghastly
Effects of Frostbite--The Skeleton Hands--Overcrowding in the
Hospitals--Dr. Fetherstonhaugh falls Ill--A Strange
Delusion--"After Long Years"--Edmund O'Donovan--A Circassian
Dinner Party--Sucking-pig _à l'Irlandaise_--A Novel
Target--Departure of Mr. Zohrab--We move into the
Consulate--Exodus to Erzinghan--An Awful Sacrifice--Christmas in
a Besieged Town--A Remarkable Plum Pudding--Illness of
Pinkerton--Funerals in Erzeroum--Casting out the Dead--"The Lean
Dogs beneath the Wall"--An Army Surgeon's Death--I fall Sick
with Typhus--Heroic Devotion of James Denniston--Some of my
Nurses--How I recovered--A Scientific Experiment--The Brain of a
Comatose Person--Vachin's Discomfiture.
As we went round the hospital wards, now that fever had made its
appearance, needless to say that we examined each patient anxiously, and
every day we found three or four more cases of typhus among the wounded
men. These we weeded out, and placed in a room specially prepared to
receive them, for on account of the severity of their wounds we could
not send them away to the central hospital.
Early in December the weather got very bad. There was a heavy fall of
snow, and the hospitals were filled with sick, until altogether there
were about four thousand sick and wounded in the town. Captain Morisot
and Mr. Harvey were most valuable assistants; but in the first week of
December Mr. Harvey, who was wanted at Constantinople, had to leave,
much to our regret. Williams, our dragoman, who had been delayed on the
road by the bad weather, came up with the stores, and took his place,
turning out a very useful assistant.
Pyæmia began to make great ravages, and the intense cold increased the
sufferings of the wounded. I amputated a man's arm at the shoulder
joint, and hoped to pull him through; but the weather beat me, for he
took pleurisy, and went off in a day.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself lived in the great, bare Armenian house
with Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston. Every morning we went off to our
respective hospitals, returned home to lunch, and then went back in the
afternoon to work again. Wood for fuel cost us twopence per pound, and
rations were poor and scarce; but we pegged away doggedly, and Mr.
Zohrab was very good to us. He had a splendid house amply provisioned
for the winter, and he was most hospitable in his invitations to dinner;
while his wife, who was a charming Englishwoman, was always cheering us
up, and his two sons often gave us a hand at the hospital.
An ominous silence was maintained by our Russian besiegers, and we found
that they had withdrawn the greater number of the troops from Erzeroum
in order to carry out the assault on Kars. Typhus, pyæmia, pneumonia,
and the bitter, deadening cold were working for the Russians, and slew
as many of the defenders of Erzeroum daily as would have fallen under
the heaviest shell fire. Woods became ill; and as there was evidently
heavy work before us, I sent him down to Constantinople, thus reducing
the strength of our little medical garrison by one.
Snow began to fall heavily, and soon the streets were covered to a depth
of several feet. At night the thermometer dropped to forty degrees below
freezing-point, and the soldiers in the open suffered severely. Every
morning five or six men were found frozen to death on outpost duty,
lying in the snow with their eyes closed and their rifles clasped in
their arms.
Meanwhile General Melikoff was making preparations for his great attack
on Kars, and at last the long expected assault was delivered, and the
Russians with their strange, untranslatable cry of "Nichivo," which is
the ultimate expression of a reckless bravery that refuses to count any
cost, swept in upon the Turkish batteries, and took the town.
Melikoff could not accommodate his numerous wounded prisoners with
quarters, so he conceived the brilliant idea of sending them on to us;
and, presenting each man who could walk with a blanket and a few
piastres, he despatched the men on their journey from Kars to Erzeroum.
What a march was that! The snow lay thickly on the frozen ground, and
for league after league the legion of the wounded dragged themselves
along, staining the snow with their blood as they "blazed" their pathway
from Kars to Erzeroum. Hundreds dropped dead on that terrible march, and
Mukhtar Pasha told me that out of two thousand men who left Kars only
three hundred and seventeen reached Erzeroum. About fifty of the
survivors came to our hospital, and one of them told me that he left
with a party of thirty, only ten of whom came through alive, and of
these ten no fewer than seven lost all their toes from frostbite.
Some typical cases of frostbite were grotesque in their ghastliness.
Fancy the experience of two men who came to us for treatment after
dragging their wounded bodies over the hundred and eighty miles of snow
that separated Kars from Erzeroum. Their hands had been frost-bitten
early in the march, and for the last week nothing was left but the
skeleton of each hand from the wrist to the finger-tips. Every particle
of flesh had rotted off, and the bones were black with decomposition.
They came to me holding out their blackened skeleton hands feebly and
pitifully before them, and I lopped off the maimed remnants at the
wrists. Both these men died from the effects of that terrible march,
which not even the lurid imagination of a Dante could easily rival.
We in our turn had to send out some of our lightly wounded men to
relieve the congested hospitals and to diminish the chances of an
epidemic. On Christmas Day we sent away sixty-six, most of whom were
wounded in the hands or arms, and they started to march to Baiburt. We
were able to give them warm jerseys, under-clothing, long stockings, and
woollen comforters, thanks to the generosity of Lord Blantyre; and three
days later we sent out another thirty, each of whom got ten piastres
from Lord Blantyre's fund in addition to the clothes. All of the men
reached Baiburt safely.
The hospitals were soon so crowded that typhus and typhoid fever raged
with added violence, and hospital gangrene, that I had seen before in
Plevna, once more made its dreaded appearance. We had eight cases in our
hospital, and lost three of them. Pyæmia and frostbite were the other
chief causes of mortality.
Pinkerton and I, with Morisot and Williams to help us, managed our three
hundred beds fairly well; but it was a great blow to us when Williams
took the fever, and was added to the sick list. When Pinkerton and
myself met Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston in the evenings at dinner, we
used to look at each other curiously, wondering which would be the
first. It was Fetherstonhaugh. He was attacked by a kind of remittent
fever, but tried to shake it off and went about his work as usual. One
night, when the rest of us were at dinner, Fetherstonhaugh came into the
dining-room, and remarked that there were three men with their throats
cut in his room. We rushed in, but found nothing, and came to the
conclusion that it was time Fetherstonhaugh left off work, so we sent
him down to Trebizond.
That was the last that I saw of him for a long, long time; but the
curious agency that for want of a better name we call coincidence
brought us together again after many years in a strange way. It happened
in Melbourne, when I had settled down to steady work at my practice, and
had almost forgotten the stirring days in Asia Minor, except for a few
rare glimpses when memory lifted the veil. I was engaged one day at the
Supreme Court as a professional witness in some case; and when I stepped
out of the box, it occurred to me that I knew the face of a man who was
sitting below me in the body of the court.
"Hullo, Ryan, how are you?" he said.
I looked again, and recognized Denniston, who told me that he had come
out from England on a trip, and had just strolled into the court out of
idle curiosity. As he was talking to me, I looked through the door
leading into the passage, and saw another face that I recognized.
"I wonder what has become of Charlie Fetherstonhaugh?" said Denniston.
"Look behind you. There he is," I replied, as Charlie Fetherstonhaugh
himself came up, sound and hearty, having left the three men with their
throats cut behind him in the hospital at Erzeroum. He too had dropped
from the clouds, and strolled into the court by mere chance. So we had
dinner together that evening, and great was the jollification thereat.
At our Stafford House Hospital in Erzeroum we had a continual stream of
fresh cases, for the cavalry were continually making dashes against the
Russians, and small affairs between outposts came off nearly every day;
so that as fast as one lot of patients died or were discharged cured, a
second lot were brought in. Cases of frostbite became very numerous, and
many a time I had to lop off a man's feet or hands the flesh of which
was simply rotting on the bones. Rations too were getting scarce, and as
there was not enough food for every one the prisoners in the gaol were
the first to suffer. The interior of that Erzeroum gaol was a sight not
soon to be forgotten. Crowded together in a state of indescribable
filth, the prisoners fought with the ferocity of wild beasts for the few
handfuls of raw grain that the guard threw to them occasionally. Still,
we continued to get beef tea and mutton broth for our wounded, and I
made a point of going round the wards and administering it myself to
those who needed it.
It was in connection with a matter of rations that I remember Edmund
O'Donovan especially. O'Donovan was one of the wildest, most brilliant,
and original geniuses who ever left Ireland to follow up the avocation
of a war correspondent. He came to dinner with us one night, and his wit
and versatility made a great impression upon me. The next time that I
saw him was in response to an urgent request that I should call upon him
and get him out of a scrape. His adventure was so thoroughly
characteristic that I may be excused for narrating it.
O'Donovan, it seemed, with the warm-hearted generosity of his race, had
invited half a dozen Circassian officers to dine with him, and had
prepared an appetizing banquet for them. Among the dishes was an entrée
so savoury, so succulent, so entirely satisfying to the palate of an
epicure, that the Circassians, like the simple children of nature that
they were, sent back their plates again and again for more. There was
something new and strange yet delightful withal about that entrée. The
meat was white and delicate and tender, the gravy was of a luscious
brown, and in a fit of absence of mind the Circassian officers loaded up
the whole cargo, while they laughed politely at O'Donovan's best Dublin
stories, which were chiefly remarkable for having points where one never
expected them.
Then O'Donovan expressed a hope that they had enjoyed the dinner, and
the Circassians were most effusive in their thanks. Really they had
never eaten anything like that entrée before, and would their host mind
telling them the recipe?
"Begorra, I can tell ye that aisy enough," spluttered O'Donovan, with a
mighty laugh. "Ye've been atin' the natest slip of a pig I've ever seen
out of Connaught, and beautifully cooked he was too." Then he explained
to them in Turkish more clearly, and these good Mussulmen burst into
eruption. What a shindy there was at that dinner-table! The Circassians
could not have been quicker if they had been at Donnybrook Fair, and
they rushed at their host with the first weapons that came handy.
O'Donovan did very well with the bottles for a minute or two, and
afterwards with the leg of a chair; but they were too many for him, and
when the table was upset and the lamps put out there was a fairly lively
five minutes round the wreck of the dinner-table and of the empty dish
that had once contained a sucking-pig _à l'Irlandaise_. The Moslem
Circassians, full to repletion with the flesh of the accursed creature,
fought under a disadvantage; and when O'Donovan's servants rushed in and
took their master's part, the issue was no longer in doubt. Although the
revolvers were going freely, only one man was hurt, and it appeared that
O'Donovan had shot him in the arm. The affair created a great deal of
excitement at the time, and the Circassians vowed vengeance for the
insult; but we managed to pacify them eventually, and there were so many
other things requiring attention that the trouble soon blew over.
This was not the only occasion that O'Donovan got into a scrape, for not
long afterwards, while promenading on the roof of his house, the idea
occurred to him that a little revolver practice might improve his aim.
Drawing his six-shooter, he proceeded to blaze away at a dog that was
gnawing a bone in the middle of the street; but like another famous
character in fiction, he "missed the blue-bottle and floored the Mogul."
In other words, a bullet which went wide of the dog found its billet in
a fleshy part of the body of a very stout Turkish woman, who on
receiving this flank attack fled in great disorder screaming loudly.
O'Donovan sent for me to help him out of this difficulty too, and we had
to give the woman £10 to square her. The erratic marksman was then the
war correspondent of the _Daily News_; but I never saw an account of
this incident in his graphic descriptive sketches. He left Erzeroum in
December, and afterwards, when the army of Hicks Pasha was cut to pieces
in Egypt, O'Donovan met a soldier's death.
At this time we lost the services of Mr. Zohrab, the consul; for after
the fall of Kars, Lord Derby, desiring to avoid any complications in the
event of the Russians occupying Erzeroum, instructed the British consul
to retire at once to Constantinople. Mr. Zohrab and his wife and sons
accordingly left the town, much to our regret, for they had been very
helpful to us. When he went, however, he handed over to us his house,
which was fully provisioned, amply supplied with fuel, and provided with
a well stocked cellar. We took possession at once, and after the poor
kind of way in which we had been living our new quarters were most
luxurious.
Although we personally were much better off than before, yet the
condition of the bulk of the people in the town was getting steadily
worse every day. Stores of every kind were getting scarce, and Kurd
Ismael Pasha, who replaced Mukhtar Pasha as commander-in-chief when that
officer was ordered to Constantinople, had a difficult task in
administration. Towards the end of December it became necessary to
relieve the town of a portion of the population, and an expedition
consisting of four hundred men and two hundred women and children was
ordered to start for Erzinghan, a town which was supposed to be five
days' journey distant from Erzeroum.
This march rivalled in its horrors the march of the wounded men from
Kars; for before the expedition had gone a day's journey from Erzeroum a
fearful snowstorm swept down upon the hapless creatures, and when the
miserable remnant had dragged themselves back to their starting-point it
was found that of the two hundred women and children not a single soul
remained. All died where they fell, including the wife of the colonel
commanding the expedition, and were buried under the drifting heaps of
snow that the wind piled high over the uncoffined remains. Of the
soldiers who got back to Erzeroum the greater number perished from
frostbite, dysentery, and exposure. It was an awful holocaust.
In spite of fever and dysentery, gunshot wounds in horrible variety and
septic disease in every hospital, so strangely is the Anglo-Saxon mind
constituted that we decided to "enjoy ourselves" at Christmas, although
the Russians were practically knocking at our gates. My previous
Christmas dinner consisted of a handful of maize cobs eaten in solitude
on the ice-bound road to Orkhanieh. During the intervening year I had
lived and worked and suffered much--and almost to my own astonishment I
was still alive. So here at Erzeroum I proposed to have a Christmas
festivity, and Pinkerton, Denniston, and Woods eagerly accepted the
suggestion. We decided to invite all the European doctors in the town,
and to give them a real English Christmas dinner, for which great
preparations had to be made.
When we took over Mr. Zohrab's house, we also assumed a right title and
interest in the services of two sturdy henchmen. One was old Tom
Rennison, who had been dragoman for General Williams during the siege of
Erzeroum thirty years before, and the other was an Armenian named
Vachin. Tom Rennison, veteran campaigner as he was, had never seen
mince-pies made, so to speak, under fire; and Vachin knew more about the
preparation of pilaf than plum pudding. Consequently not only the
arrangement of the _menu_, but the actual work of cooking it, devolved
upon the medical staff; and I am sorry to say that, though by this time
there were few things in surgery which we would not attempt, from
disarticulation of a thumb to amputation of a thigh, nevertheless in the
science of cooking we were painfully unlearned. Lister was an open book
to us; but the dark sayings of Brillat-Savarin were as obscure as the
Rig-Vedas.
Pinkerton, Woods, and myself held a consultation over the plum pudding,
which was intended to beget envy and jealousy in the hearts of the
Austrian and Hungarian doctors, and to be a dazzling example of the
superiority of Anglo-Saxon cooking over the unsubstantial kickshaws of
continental cuisines. I noticed that Vachin, who was always an ill
disposed fellow, looked undisguisedly contemptuous of our preparations,
and that old Tom Rennison was obviously fluctuating between the extremes
of hope and fear. It is not easy to recollect exactly what was in that
pudding. Denniston had heard that suet was an ingredient of supreme
importance, so the yellow fat was cut from the joint of beef which had
been moving about the yard only two days before as the sirloin of Mr.
Zohrab's best heifer. We found plenty of currants and raisins among the
stores; but there was no candied peel, and the spices which had been
imported from Teheran somehow smelt quite unlike the unconvincing
substance that we remembered to have seen in our youth at the suburban
grocer's. We had plenty of flour of course, and we mixed our
_chef-d'œuvre_ in a big brown pot. It was a viscous, œdematous mass, of
the consistency of soft indiarubber, when we had done mixing it, and it
resembled nothing so much as a bucketful of Zante currants which had
fallen by accident into a glue-pot. The other fellows made some very
discouraging remarks; but I tied up the ghastly mixture in half a clean
sheet, and sat up all night on Christmas Eve boiling it in the iron pot.
On Christmas night we had a grand banquet, and about twenty other
European doctors came in answer to our invitations to receive our
hospitality. We explained to them at some length that we were going to
give them a real English dinner, which was a treat that they had
probably never enjoyed before, and very likely might never enjoy again.
Certainly the beef was a little tough, as the hapless heifer had only
been sacrificed on the previous day, and then there was no horse-radish
and very little gravy; but the geese were first-rate. Like everything
else in Asia Minor, they were evidently of great antiquity. Probably
they had seen the former siege of Erzeroum; but age, which weakens most
other things, had strengthened their limbs and steeled their muscles,
until to disintegrate the closely knitted tissues was a veritable feat
of strength, and one swallowed a mouthful with the comfortable glow of
satisfaction that follows the surmounting of a desperate difficulty. Of
the mince-pies I cannot speak with certainty, for Woods had taken
complete control over the manufacture of these delicious delicacies,
and, much as I respected my colleague, I was suspicious of his
ingredients. I can testify, however, from the simple experience of
lifting one up from the dish that the mince-pies were solid and weighty
additions to the _menu_. I waited with some anxiety for the pudding, and
the happiness that the artist feels in a work completed came over me as
I saw old Tom Rennison bearing in the dish containing the pudding,
surrounded by leaping tongues of blue flame from the burning brandy. Up
to this period the Hungarian doctors had been politely complimentary,
and had accepted slabs of heifer's flesh as hard as boot leather and
chunks of goose that would have made excellent ammunition for siege
artillery as typical dishes of a correct English dinner. By dint of
washing the food down with plenty of wine and many tumblers of
brandy-and-water, they struggled along gamely through the first courses;
but when they received their portions of the plum pudding they
distinctly jibbed. With the flames playing round its charred, excoriated
surface, it certainly had a diabolical look, and it held together with a
glutinous consistency that for an appreciable number of seconds defied
the attack even of a carving-knife. The Hungarian doctors viewed their
plates with an alarmed suspicion that was too genuine to be concealed,
and I must confess that when I got a spoonful of my masterpiece into my
mouth the taste did not compensate in the least for the difficulty of
detaching the fragment from the surrounding bed-rock. That was the first
and last time that I cooked a plum pudding.
In spite of these little drawbacks, however, we all thoroughly enjoyed
our Christmas dinner, and we made a fair hole in Mr. Zohrab's cellar,
which was well stocked with wines and spirits and also with beer and
porter. The dawn was coming up over the snow on the distant hills when
we separated, laughing, singing, and wishing each other a Merry
Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Within a fortnight nearly every one of us was down with typhus, and
within a month more than half of our number were dead.
The first of the English doctors to catch the fever was poor Pinkerton.
He was always terribly frightened of it, and used to carry quantities of
camphor about in his pockets as a disinfectant; but with the epidemic
raging as it was, any attempt at personal disinfection for a medical man
attending the cases was practically hopeless. Pinkerton was always
talking about his dread of getting typhus, and saying that if he caught
it he would never get over it. This made Denniston and myself very
anxious about him; for though he was a splendidly built, handsome
fellow, with an excellent constitution, his apprehensions laid him open
to attack more readily, and would certainly decrease his chance of
recovery if the fever got its clutch upon him. Wrought up to a state of
high nervous tension by continually moving among the sick and the dying,
it was not to be wondered at that we attached significance to the
veriest trifles, and both Denniston and myself recollected with dismay
that every one of our patients who had had a presentiment of death up to
that time had died.
On the last day of the old year Pinkerton became ill, and we put him to
bed. He was very despondent, and I could see at once that he had an
attack of the most malignant typhus. He was a very bad patient, and
would take neither his medicine nor his nourishment without a great deal
of trouble. Our number was now reduced to two, and Denniston and myself
looked at each other every morning with questioning gaze. Fortunately
Denniston had had malignant typhus in his student days at Glasgow, and
was not likely to take it again, while I felt that if I could only pull
through we might still be able to keep on the two hospitals. After three
or four days Pinkerton fell into a semi-comatose condition, from which
he never emerged, but lay in bed moaning feebly, and talking
incoherently at intervals of fighting and of operations and of places
and people whose names were unfamiliar to me.
How clearly those dreadful days come back! We had the ever present,
bitter, numbing cold, and the ceaseless work in the hospital as one
passed from bed to bed, from the moaning wounded to the poor wretches
who were being consumed by the fires of fever, and thence to the ghastly
mutilated creatures who had lost hands, feet, ears, and even noses by
frostbite. Then there was in addition the anxiety about Pinkerton, and
the fear that one or both of us two survivors would succumb to the
strain, and thus leave the bulk of the sick and wounded without medical
succour. In addition to it all was the nervous strain of waiting for the
expected Russian attack, which would have been gladly welcomed as a
relief from the intolerable tension.
During these early days of January, 1878, the mortality in Erzeroum was
something appalling. Out of a total number of about seventeen thousand
troops in the town, there were on one day no fewer than three hundred
and two deaths, and the daily death-rate frequently rose to two hundred!
The weak, emaciated survivors had hardly strength left to dig graves for
their dead comrades in the hard and frozen ground. At last they gave up
even the pretence of digging, and the bodies were simply carted out
about a mile from the main thoroughfares of the town, and left in the
snow just inside the city walls.
[Illustration:
Sketch Map of Country
between
Trebizond and Erzerum.
_To face p. 348._
Walker & Bouthall sc.]
Of course all conveyances were placed on runners while the snow was on
the ground, and the little sleighs which served as dead-carts passed our
house every morning at about ten o'clock with their mournful loads
collected from the various hospitals. The bodies of the dead soldiers
were stripped of their clothing and wrapped in clean white sheets
according to the Moslem custom. Each little sleigh contained ten or
twelve bodies, and as I looked out in the morning I could see the burial
parties going out on duty. The white-sheeted corpses were packed closely
together; and as the sleighs had no tailboards and were very small, the
naked feet of the corpses projected out at the back in a horribly
grotesque fashion. As the little vehicles, which were dragged by the
fatigue squads, glided in ghostly silence over the frozen snow a long
howl in the distance broke the stillness. This was taken up by another,
and another, and another, until the voices of fully fifteen hundred
famished dogs came through the crisp, clear wintry air with terrible
significance, chilling the marrow of the listener as he watched the long
procession of helpless, white-sheeted corpses moving slowly over the
white-sheeted ground. A Parsee's obsequies, when the filthy vultures
flap their wings and gather to the feast, must be an eerie sight; a
Gussein's funeral in the Ganges, where the great flat-nosed alligators
swarm expectantly, must stir even the sluggish imagination of the
impassive Hindoo. But surely no man ever had more dreadful burial rites
than were celebrated daily over hundreds of the dead inside the walls of
Erzeroum, where the famished dogs disputed the possession of the poor
mutilated remnants with sickening ferocity, and where the only prayers
over the bodies of the dead were the muttered growls of the worrying
pack. There is a short passage in "The Siege of Corinth" which exactly
describes the grisly scene. Lord Byron wrote of Alp the renegade as he
paced under the walls of Corinth these lines:
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh,
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed.
In this passage the poet has described with more detail than one cares
to give in a plain narrative the scene which was enacted every morning
in the early part of that month of January within the walls of Erzeroum.
It was about January 8 that I took the fever, which was by this time
ravaging both the civil and military population. At first I tried to
shake it off, and continued to walk about with aching head and quaking
limbs in the hope that it might not have got a fair hold of me. On the
second day I became quite stupid, though I still refused to go to bed,
and on the evening of that day Pinkerton died.
Next morning we buried him. Wood was so difficult to get, that we were
put to great straits to make a coffin for him; but at last we contrived
one out of an old packing-case. Pinkerton was a very tall man, and the
flimsy coffin was hardly big enough for the body. There was scarcely
enough wood to make the lid fit properly. When we were making the
preparations for the burial, I was myself nearly delirious with typhus,
and almost the last thing that I can remember before going off
altogether was the sight of the miserable coffin with a gaping crevice
in the top, through which the end of poor Pinkerton's silky fair beard
was protruding. Denniston notified Hakki Bey, the civil governor, of our
loss; and an escort of soldiers came down and buried our comrade by the
side of Dr. Guppy, who had died on duty in the same place before we
arrived there. The burial service was read by the Rev. Mr. Cole, an
American missionary, who was in Erzeroum, accompanied by his wife and
family and by a young American lady, also engaged in missionary work
among the Armenians. Then the soldiers fired a volley over the grave,
and the career of the fine young army surgeon was closed.
When I was put to bed, the whole strength of the medical and assisting
staff of the two English hospitals, Lord Blantyre's Hospital and that of
the Stafford House Committee, was reduced to one man, namely, Dr.
Denniston. Guppy and Pinkerton were dead, and Williams, Morisot, and
myself were down with typhus. Under these circumstances, Denniston was
left with the two hospitals full of patients to look after as well as
us three at home, and he rose to the occasion most heroically.
Of course at that time I was unconscious of everything, but I found out
afterwards what happened. Denniston handed the English hospital back to
the Turkish administration which had managed it before our arrival, and
he secured an assistant from the French consul to help him with the
other one and with us. He told me afterwards that I made a very good
patient, but I doubt it. I can just remember him coming in to see me one
day and giving me a pill, which, though I was almost delirious, I made a
great pretence of swallowing, but really kept it under my tongue and
spat it out as soon as he had left the room!
The American missionary, Mr. Cole, used to come and sit with me
sometimes. I had known him before I was ill, and admired his character
greatly. He seemed to me to be a very fine type of man and a true
Christian. In Erzeroum at that time the healing of souls was attended
with as much danger as the healing of bodies, and there were martyrs in
both causes. Mr. Cole lost one of his children from typhus, and the
bright, winning, and enthusiastic young American lady who was working as
a missionary in conjunction with him and Mrs. Cole also laid down her
life in the noble service in which she had engaged.
During the day, while Denniston was away at the hospital fighting a
desperate single-handed battle against wounds and disease of every kind,
we patients at home had many kindly visitors. Morisot and Williams got
over the worst of the illness sooner than I did; but for some time we
all required watching.
I am sorry to say that during my illness I grievously erred against good
taste, and quite forgot the esteem and regard which I venture to believe
I had always hitherto shown towards ladies. The fact of the matter was
that I had seen so few ladies in the past eighteen months that the sight
of them irritated and annoyed my disordered brain exceedingly. So it
came about that, when two sweet-faced French nuns, who had heard from
Dr. Denniston of his desperate need for nurses, called in and visited
me, I viewed their presence with the profoundest suspicion and distrust.
I had been working for so long among great, strong, hairy-faced Turks
that my delirious imagination failed to recognize these two young nuns,
with their rustling skirts and their soft white hands, as fellow
creatures at all, and I expressed such terror and alarm at their
appearance that the poor things were obliged to fly. In the _Ingoldsby
Legends_ there is a picture of François Xavier Auguste, the gay
_mousquetaire_, sitting up in bed in an attitude of horror, while on
chairs at each side of his pillow sit duplicate images of Sister
Thérèse. I must have looked very much like that when the well meaning
nuns came in to sit by me, and found my language and demeanour so
terrifying that they had to decamp at once, leaving me to the less
exciting ministrations of a dear old Capuchin monk called Father
Basilio, who was sent to take their place. He used to sit up with me in
the long night watches and humour all my fancies, kindly old soul that
he was; but I think he never expected that I would pull through.
Though young in years, I was a veteran as far as horrors were concerned,
and I can truthfully say that I was absolutely without fear of death.
Possibly it was this that saved me, for I remember telling Denniston at
the worst period of my illness that he need have no fear on my account,
for I had not the slightest intention of "pegging out."
I was very bad for about twelve days, and the events of that time of
illness impressed themselves on my brain in the vaguest and most
indistinct manner. Still, it is interesting from the scientific point of
view to note that impressions can be made even upon a semi-comatose
brain which are sufficiently strong to be of subsequent use. The
negatives on the convolutions of the brain were not very sharply
outlined; but the will, like a skilful photographer, could retouch them
afterwards until they made a perfect picture. This scientific fact I
was able to demonstrate myself, to the great confusion of our Armenian
dragoman Vachin.
It happened this way. When I recovered from the fever, I was helping
Denniston to make an inventory of poor Pinkerton's personal effects, so
that we could send them to his relatives, when we made the unpleasant
discovery that a sum of £20 which he had in his possession was missing.
Pinkerton used to carry the money in Turkish liras in the pocket of his
trousers; and as I had been shifted into his room after his death
because it was larger and airier than my own, his trousers were hanging
on a nail on the wall right opposite my bed. We examined the pockets,
but they were empty.
Then I began to think back and to think hard. Gradually there appeared
before the eye of my mind the picture of a shadowy, misty, unsubstantial
figure, that wobbled grievously from side to side as it walked, and
seemed to turn round and round with the room, the bed, the chair, and
the window, which all swung and oscillated like the engines of the
little Messageries steamer that brought us up to Trebizond. What on
earth was the captain of the Messageries steamer going to do! and how
the little tub was rolling, to be sure! Was it the captain, though, or
some one else? I fastened all the will power of my brain, healthy once
more, upon the misty shadow cast upon its disordered surface during
illness. I saw the scene again, more distinctly now, and noted that the
wobbling figure approached the wall exactly at the spot where the
trousers hung on the nail opposite my bed. The engines seemed to be
slowing down, little by little the room ceased to revolve, and at last
the figure turned round towards my bed, and I saw the face. It was not
the captain of the steamer, but it was Vachin, our dragoman, and he was
deliberately counting out money from poor Pinkerton's trousers pocket.
All this came back to me with greater clearness the longer I thought
over it; and at last I felt morally certain that Vachin was the thief,
and that he had cynically taken the money before my eyes, knowing that I
was delirious, and confident that I would never recover to bear witness
against him.
We taxed the Armenian with the theft; and when I told him that it was no
use denying it, for I had seen him take the money, he confessed his
guilt. A short consultation between Denniston and myself was followed by
the despatch of a note to Hakki Bey, the civil governor; and as a
punishment for misdeeds in the past and an incentive to virtue in the
future, Vachin was consigned to the Erzeroum general prison pending the
pleasure of the governor. We got back the £20 from him before he went,
and for three weeks we left him in a place, from which the Black Hole of
Calcutta would have been a pleasant change, to meditate upon the
instability of human happiness. We sent him some blankets and also food
at intervals, besides going up occasionally to see how he was getting on
and whether he was truly repentant. The condition of the unfortunate
wretch, however, was so deplorable, and the interior of that prison,
with its gangs of half-frozen, half-starved prisoners fighting fiercely
among themselves for the scanty dole of raw grain and old rags that were
thrown among them by the gaolers, was so distressing, that we relented,
and procured a release for our thievish dragoman from Hakki Bey. On the
night that he was discharged from prison he deserted to the Russians,
and we never saw him again. And so farewell to Vachin.