Henty carefully studied the ways and means of the Turkish army, not only
the uniform and ornament, but the customs in connection with the various
battalions. Though the Ottoman forces are not such as can be held up as
examples of military excellence, he extols them as being composed of
brave and admirable fighting men who are on the whole abominably paid,
whose pittance is shamefully in arrear, but who still go patiently and
uncomplainingly on, content with the small mercies they receive, and the
kindly treatment of their officers who suffer with them. They march the
more cheerfully from the fact that during a campaign every battalion has
its own band, while as a rule the bandsmen have gained so much from the
West that their performances of popular music are far above contempt.
As a rule here in England ordinary people do not know much of Turkish
music. "The Turkish Patrol" and that very old favourite, "The Caliph of
Bagdad", seem to belong nearly as much to the West as to the East; but
in Servia Henty was made familiar with plenty of good Western operatic
music, which was always bright and cheering in dreary times when on
march. And while discoursing upon the bands he notes that, just as in
English regiments, they take their serious part in the war, their play
being of course connected with the production of enlivening strains to
lighten the dull hours of a heavy march, their work being as bearers of
the wounded.
National music such as is familiar to the people of the country is
abundant and popular, of course; but it was amusing at one time in camp,
when the war was dragging slowly on, to find that a band which played
every evening under the Pasha General's tent finished up with a few bars
of "God Save the Queen."
Constantly observant, Henty was always attracted by everything connected
with the Turkish hospitals. He was quite fair. If he saw anything in
their management deserving of condemnation he spoke out. On the other
hand, if he noticed anything, however trifling, worthy of praise, it was
carefully noted. He records with something like a feeling of pride in
his fellow-men, how an officer, having the power to command, had ordered
that one of the bands should go down to the camp hospital to play for an
hour every day, the Turkish officers declaring to him that the music
raised the spirits and improved the condition of the sick and wounded.
He continues with an anecdote of the _se non e vero, e ben trovato_
type, namely, that a poor fellow, who had lost his arm in one of the
first skirmishes, had been so revived by the music that he had begged
permission to join the ranks again with a limb of wood! Of course it
may be true; but everyone is at liberty to doubt, and one cannot help
giving the Turkish narrators the credit of trying a joke upon their
foreign chronicler.
During this campaign, on the principle that straws sometimes indicate
the direction from which the wind blows, Henty grew more observant of
matters connected with the sufferings of human life. It was as if many
of his notes and remarks were forced upon him by his own feelings, and
as though his personal sensations sharpened his observation.
Here was he, a man who had passed through the heats and colds of
mountainous Africa in the march to Magdala, complaining, justly enough,
of course, but in words that indicated how keenly he must have suffered,
of the heat and cold of Asia Minor. He says of the one that it is
terrible by day, while the other is piercing by night, and both extremes
even he, a strong man, found very hard to bear--harder terms these than
any which he applied to the heavy stagnant heat of Ashanti.
Then he speaks of the skin tents as being simply unbearable when the sun
was up, while the flies were maddening, and he has a thoughtful word for
the poor horses, which suffered as much as their riders, being almost
devoured by the darkening swarms.
He notes, too, that the Turkish sentinels when on duty were provided
with a small umbrella tent to shelter them from the heat of the sun and
from the rain; that a Turkish sentinel does not pace up and down when on
sentry-go, but stands immovable all the time while he is on duty, and
adds dryly that he has plenty of time for observation in the Turkish
camp, for the army is dilatory in its movements. Then he turns to make
some fresh observation, as there is no fighting going on, upon the
appearance of a battalion of Egyptian soldiers which had joined the
camp. The men were clothed in white from head to foot, with the
exception of the tarboosh, which was, of course, scarlet, and, with his
old military instinct aroused, he compares the Egyptian uniform with the
Turkish, to the disadvantage of the latter in their blue serge.
He goes on, too, to comment not only upon their dress, but upon their
evolutions--unfixing bayonets, grounding arms, etc--and their activity.
The Egyptians were dark brown of skin, but the Turks were no darker than
Spaniards, often as fair as Englishmen.
On another day his attention is attracted by a raid that has been made
by the irregulars connected with the army, ending in a skirmish with the
Servians, and a return laden with plunder, consisting of goats, cattle,
and horses. He ends up with a pithy memorandum that the Bashi-Bazouks
receive no pay, so make the surrounding country keep up their supplies.
With regard to the food supplies of the regulars, it seems that every
Turk carries a leathern pouch which contains ground coffee and sugar, so
that with a little bread and water they can get on pretty well.
As for the Bashi-Bazouks, who depend upon the country, which would
probably account for their unpopular character, Henty noted them a good
deal. They were a peculiarly mixed lot, apparently raised wherever men
could be obtained, many of them being negroes of Herculean proportions.
He notes, too, how laughter seems to go with the black, whether he be in
the Turkish army, a negro from the Guinea Coast (such as strengthened or
weakened our army in the Ashanti campaign), seen civilised in the West
Indies, or serving in New York. There is always at the slightest
provocation the disposition to part the thick lips, bare the big white
ivory teeth, and burst into the hoarse horse-laugh. A rough lot, these
Bashi-Bazouks, but Henty's eyes must have glistened with eager interest
and flashed with the desire of a collector who had a little museum of
his own at home, as he examined their weapons. These were the arms of a
dozen different nations, some carrying rusty, worthless old pistols,
while others had damascened blades of beautiful wavy forging and
razor-like keenness, such as could not be bought for money.
Towards the end of his connection with this campaign he constantly
recurs to the various skirmishes, many being encounters mostly brought
on by Servian patriots--small affairs in which no military skill was
brought to bear, and in which the injuries were, for the most part, the
result of musket bullets, the wounds by sword and bayonet being few. He
goes on to complain bitterly of the Eastern callousness and conduct of
man to man, the indifference he witnessed being revolting. And then
later, when at last the war became fiercer, his humanity was again
stirred and he referred to the hospitals in one of the towns, which he
described as "chock full", so encumbered, in fact, that wounded men had
to lie in the streets from day to day, the people passing them by and
noticing them no more than if they were logs of timber.
In some of the rooms used there were neither beds nor mattresses, but
simply the hard brick floor, for the wounded to lie upon in their
blood-saturated clothes, waiting till one of the medical men could find
time to attend to them. The doctors were working the while like slaves,
extracting bullets or dressing wounds, and then giving the poor fellows
a little plum brandy before they were lifted into a bullock-cart, with a
truss of hay for a seat, and sent to recover or die elsewhere, while
many who could not bear transport had to stay until nature mercifully
intervened, and glory and patriotism became the mists of another and a
brighter day.
Henty described how he was pulled up on one occasion because a river had
to be crossed, and the army had to wait until a bridge then being made
was finished. At least half a dozen times did the infantry get under
arms and the artillery harness their horses. A more tedious day, he
said, he never passed. His tent was packed, he had no place to sit down
to write, and his sole amusement was watching the Circassians and
Bashi-Bazouks come in laden with plunder.
The selection made by these freebooters had been strange and
miscellaneous at first, but as things grew scarce, nothing was
considered unworthy of the scoundrels' notice, for they scraped together
trifles that would not have fetched a piastre, and they took not the
slightest notice of the ridicule of the regular Turkish soldiers around.
These laughed scornfully at the plundering habits of the irregulars,
and were not above pointing them out to the English looker-on,
exclaiming, "No bono Tcherkess--no bono Bashi-Bazouk!" Henty does not
scruple to call these men a disgrace to the Turkish government; but it
seems that the army often had to depend upon them for supplies.
And after this fashion the weary war went on. The inexhaustible letters
were despatched, each teeming with interest, till rumours began to reach
the writer of overtures being made by the Servians to the Turks for
peace; but these were only contradicted and followed by a desperate
encounter, or the siege of some little stronghold.
Then more rumours of peace; suggestions in the way of news; a short
interregnum; then a recrudescence of the war, with Henty once more
afoot, following the movements of the Turkish army or some brigade, to
be present at an attack or to watch some threatening Servian movement
being driven across one or other of the rivers. All the time the quiet,
thoughtful correspondent was supplying his columns of interesting
material to his messengers. The long chronicle grew and grew, and no
mention was made of weariness, cruel suffering, semi-starvation, want of
rest, and the difficulty of obtaining the sinews of war to carry on his
fight. For no matter how careful the means taken for transmitting
funds, the difficulties of cashing orders, and the troubles incident
upon the money passing through foreign hands, which closed upon coin and
objected to reopen, were often distressing in the extreme.
Now and then, though, a letter gives a hint about the difficulty of the
war correspondent's task--the sort of hint for which one has to read
between the lines--and at last, with the year waning and passing into
autumn, and while chronicling that difficulties were arising in
connection with the army he accompanied, and that Russia, long
threatening and working in connection with the politics of Europe, was
at last thoroughly taking the field and preparing to give check in the
cause of Christianity against the Moslem, Henty touches on his own
situation. Now it was, too, that the time arrived for an announcement
of the armistice that was to come into force.
At this period, completely worn out, the correspondent writes: "I leave
the camp to-morrow for England, with the conviction that the war is
over, as it is hardly possible that the European powers can permit it to
recommence... But even did I think otherwise, I must most reluctantly
have given up my post of correspondent with the Turkish army, for the
long-continued indisposition brought on by bad food and hard living has
at last overpowered me, and the doctors tell me that it is absolutely
necessary for me to have rest, good living, and home comforts. I never
quitted an army more reluctantly, for never have I been with one where I
have received such uniform kindness, and whose men I had so much reason
to like. I defy the most anti-Mohammedan fanatic to stop a month with
this army without experiencing a complete change of sentiment, for a
more liberal set of men than these quiet, willing, patient, and cheerful
soldiers does not exist on the face of the earth. I have been with the
troops of most nations of Europe, including, of course, our own, under
circumstances of hardship and fatigue, and I can say that none of them
can compare with the Turkish troops in point of good humour and patient
endurance."
Henty struggled on, however, to the last, and we read of him in
connection with the campaign in the Dobrudscha. Here his health
completely broke down, and for some time he was an invalid.
He never did any further war correspondent's work, but for many years
edited the telegrams and letters that came in to the _Standard_ from the
younger and more active men who had taken up his work. In fact, he went
abroad no more, except on one trip through the United States to see for
himself what mining life was like in Omaha, California, and elsewhere,
and also to explore the rich copper country of the shores and islands of
Lake Superior. No better man could have been found, from his old
experience, for the investigation. But this was to him more of a
holiday.