Under the Red Crescent. John Sandes
of him, it was difficult to realize that one was not assisting at some great State ball in London or Paris, but at a function in a small Bulgarian frontier town lying almost under the guns of an avowedly hostile force.
A wide divan ran round the room, and on this the Turkish officers sat cross-legged, observing the proceedings with grave interest. The Turk is quite used to paying people to dance for his amusement, but he would never dream of dancing himself. I watched one dignified old Turkish colonel striving hard to maintain that decorous impassivity which a few of the ballroom exquisites of the Western world seem to have borrowed from the East; but every now and then, as some audacious young Giaour like myself glided past clasping a vision of beauty all silk and lace and pearls and flowers in his arms, I saw the old Turk's eyes open wider and wider in spite of himself. Zara Dilber Effendi had performed his share of the work well, for he had collected about sixty of the most cultured, refined, and beautiful women that I have ever seen together in a ballroom. There were a few Bulgarian ladies of the highest class; but the majority were Spanish Jewesses from seventeen to twenty years of age, with the rich colouring, the dark hair, and liquid eyes of all their race, or stately Roumanians, statuesque in type. There was a liberal sprinkling of Levantines, Italians, Greeks, and possibly two or three Servians; but though they differed in race, they were alike in one particular, for all were beautiful and refined. These ladies, I must admit, were little short of a revelation to me, for I had only seen a few thickly veiled Turkish women in the town hitherto; but Zara Dilber Effendi was evidently a person of some note in Widdin, and the invitations had been sent out to none but the ladies of the most aristocratic families in the country.
I was the only Englishman present at that remarkable ball; and I suppose it is not often that an Englishman finds himself assisting at an entertainment of such half-barbaric splendour, and held under such dramatic circumstances. Every man in the room knew that the commencement of a fierce campaign was only a question of weeks, perhaps days; and we snatched the enjoyment of the hour as gaily as did the guests at the Duchess of Richmond's famous ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. Indeed the parallel between Osman Pasha's ball and the historic ball at Brussels which Byron has celebrated was a very real one. In both cases the dancers were dancing on the edge of a battle-field. In both cases the existence of an empire hung on the issue of the coming struggle. In both cases many of the brave men gathered there amid the music and the flowers and under the flags and lamplight were soon to be lying out upon the blood-soaked plain, cold and deserted—the débris of a dreadful festival. We had no "Brunswick's fated chieftain" there that evening; but the courtly old Turkish colonel who sat up cross-legged on the divan, and watched me so intensely while I danced, makes in my eyes a far more vivid picture. I saw him afterwards, again in a sitting posture, outside a redoubt near Radishevo, when the tide of battle had ebbed back, only to flow again in fiercer volume. His head had fallen forward on his knees, and when I touched him I found that he was dead—cut almost in two by a Russian shell.
However, the shadow of the impending war only served to throw the brightness of the ball into stronger relief, and I gave myself up to the business of pleasure with all the ardour of two and twenty. There were only about a dozen of us, mostly members of the medical staff, who were dancing men, and we were consequently kept busy. I generally divided one waltz into three parts; and as the other men followed my lead, we were able to give all the ladies a turn occasionally, and there were no wall-flowers. A big ambulance tent had been pitched in the garden to serve as a supper-room, and we paid for the refreshments as we had them, the money going to the hospital fund. I used to take my partners out after every dance, and the champagne corks were flying almost as thickly as the bullets later on. I recollect that I spent just £9 on suppers and refreshments during the evening. A man is not inclined to be economical when he knows that before long he may have no mouth to put champagne in and no head left to get dizzy with it. Zara Dilber Effendi had got in a splendid supper from Crajova in Roumania, where he also obtained the favours for the cotillion which was danced in perfect style under the direction of the experienced Madame Kronberg and Madame Busch.
Among my partners that night were three very charming sisters, who had been born in Roumania, but whose father was a Greek. They spoke German very well, and consequently I danced more often with them than with the other ladies, with whom I found greater difficulty in conversing. The sisters were good enough to take quite an interest in me, and they invited me to call at their house during the week, following up their verbal invitation with a note next day. At the end of a sheet of dainty little handwriting on scented notepaper was a remarkable postscript (I find that ladies generally put the most important part of their communications into the postscript) setting forth that their grandfather had a rooted aversion to all Englishmen, myself in particular, and that he would certainly shoot me if he found me calling on his granddaughters. In campaigning times one is not discouraged by trifles, and soon after the ball I called upon my three charming partners, who entertained me with coffee and music at their beautiful home. Suddenly a step was heard on the stairs, and the eldest of the sisters with a blanched face whispered that it was their grandfather, and bade me fly at once. I dropped from the window into the lane below, and as I did so the irascible old Greek opened fire on me with a blunderbuss. Fortunately for me his anger had affected his aim, and I escaped unscathed. A few years more or less make little difference in national proclivities. Old Lambro, the Greek pirate who attacked Don Juan, is said by Byron to have been "the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat"; and the grandfather of my fair partners seemed to have inherited something of the same temperament with a certain difference.
In April of the year 1877 we began to realize fully that war was imminent, and the Turkish commanders set to work to prepare their troops for a stern and fierce fight. Every day almost the small, flat-bottomed, single-masted boats that plied up and down the Danube kept arriving with cargoes of flour and maize for victualling the town, and also with reinforcements of fresh troops, who were packed on board as close as eggs in a basket. Most of the reinforcements were quartered in the large camp, which was pitched about two miles and a half out of Widdin towards the Servian border; and when all had arrived, we found about thirty-five battalions of infantry there, with several batteries of artillery and squadrons of cavalry, the whole making up an imposing corps d'armée. As the camp increased in proportions, it was found that more surgeons were required, and I received orders to give up my hospital work in the fortress and report myself for duty at the camp. I was appointed one of the ambulance surgeons, and rejoined my old regiment, the Kyrchehir, which had been sent out from the fortress. The camp was situated on a long, green slope of rising ground, several miles in length; and here the long lines of bell tents were pitched, among them the tent of my old comrade the paymaster, with whom I once more foregathered.
About half a mile from the camp was a large marsh or swamp, where great white arum lilies grew, with jonquils, narcissus, and the different kinds of iris, in magnificent profusion, as well as millions of the tiny white snowflakes. I had a trench dug outside my tent, and once a week our two servants, the paymaster's and my own, went down to the swamp, and brought back barrowfuls of flowers, which I planted in the trench. Here too the orderlies made me a great seat of turf, and every morning from six o'clock till half-past nine I sat there among the flowers to receive my patients, who used to come up from the different battalions to have their various ailments treated. Epsom salts formed a sovereign remedy for most of the trifling sicknesses, and my method of giving the physic was extremely primitive. As I sat on my throne of turf, I had a sackful of Epsom salts beside me, together with a bucket of water and a pannikin; so that when the patient had swallowed a handful of the salts I presented him with a pannikin of water, and he washed the nauseous mouthful down. The men never complained, and accepted these simple ministrations with exemplary sang-froid.
As a rule the Turks have excellent teeth; but in such a large assemblage of men there were of course many exceptions, and I had a good deal of tooth-drawing to do. Some of those Mussulman molars were dreadfully obstinate, and resisted every effort of the Giaour with fanatical determination. One man with a huge aching grinder in his upper jaw came to me three mornings in succession, for with the simple appliances at my disposal I was unable to extract it in one sitting. At last I made him sit down on the ground in front of me, and, grasping the forceps in my right hand, I braced my feet against the pit of his stomach, and put forth every effort. There was a crunching, grinding noise, a sound of breaking and rending, then a "plop"