At this time trouble was brewing in the east of Europe and less than a year later war between Russia and Turkey was declared. In the early spring of the year, the opposing forces were playing a game of long bowls across the Danube, and very soon the forces commanded by “the divine figure of the North,” as Mr Gladstone most infelicitously styled the Czar, had set foot upon the enemy's country. Just before this happened, I received a visit from a gentleman who announced himself as Colonel Keenan, the English representative of the Chicago Times, who wanted to know if he could enlist my services for the campaign. I assented eagerly, some sort of a hurried contract was drawn up between us, and on the morrow I was away, bound for Schumla, proposing to take Vienna en route, and thence to steam down the Danube to the theatre of the war. I found that the Donau Damp Schiff Company had despatched its last steamboat to the Black Sea twenty-four hours before I reached Vienna and that the service was temporarily suspended. There was nothing for it but to go on to Trieste and to take boat to Constantinople. I found the city proclaimed in a state of siege and filled with all the rascaldom and ruffiandom of Tripoli and Smyrna, who held the respectable portion of the community in terror, so long as they were quartered there.

There was an encampment of these gentry about five thousand strong between the city and that dreary and dirty canal which enjoys the romantic appellation of “the sweet waters of Europe.” They were soon to be let loose for the suppression of a wholly imaginary Bulgarian insurrection, and it was they and their comrades who, together with the Bashi-Bazouks, carried the banner of rapine, fire and slaughter throughout the land. They gave us a mere taste of their quality before they had occupied their quarters for a week. A Greek lady and her daughter, drawn by curiosity, ventured through their lines. They were subjected to unspeakable outrages and, together with their coachman, were cruelly murdered; and after this occurrence, the city never breathed freely until they were marched away up country. After their dispersal the authorities appear to have paid but little attention to their commissariat and they were left to live by pillage. Many months later I ventured to ask an officer of the regulars on what principle they were supposed to be paid. “PayÉs?” responded the gentleman whom I questioned, “ils ne sont pas payÉs, ils volent.”

One of my fellow-passengers from Trieste was a young German officer who had fought through the Franco-German campaign and had now obtained leave to volunteer on the Turkish side against Russia. He was the grandson of an Irish peer, but his father had long filled some diplomatic office in Berlin. On his death the family had settled in Germany and the young officer of whom I speak was a naturalised subject of the emperor. He and I put up at the Byzance Hotel together and there a strange thing happened. A fellow-guest at the hotel came to dinner one evening with a young French officer, a very handsome, alert and gallant fellow, whom I got to know intimately afterwards. His host sat him down at the table d'hÔte opposite the young German, and almost from the first it was to be seen that the two looked at each other in a curious way. By and by the Frenchman arose and drawing his host aside made a whispered communication to him and withdrew. It turned out afterwards that the two men had been engaged on different sides in the great cavalry charge at Gravelotte. When the opposing regiments met, there was a tremendous mÊlÉe after the first shock, and the Frenchman had engaged both the young German officer whom he now encountered and his brother, the latter of whom fell by his hand. They had never met before nor did they ever encounter afterwards, but the recognition on both sides was instantaneous. Captain Tiburce Morisot—that was the Frenchman's name—made another curious recognition of which I was a witness. I was dining with him at the Hotel Misseri when there entered a big stalwart fellow who sat down opposite to us. “I beg your pardon,” said my entertainer, speaking across the table, “but I think that you and I have met before somewhere.” “So I was thinking,” the big man answered; “I was trying to size you up in my own mind but I can't manage it.” “Were you ever in Africa?” the other asked him. “Yes,” the big man answered, “I spent some years there.” “Big game shooting?” asked my host “Yes,” said the other. “Do you remember coming across a party of Frenchmen who were cutting a military road?” He named the region, and the man who was interrogated answered “Yes,” he did remember it. “You brought a giraffe's heart into the camp,” said Morisot, “and asked leave to roast it at our fire.” “I did,” the other answered, “and, by Jove! you're the man who was in command of that party.” They renewed their acquaintance with a cordial handgrip, and clinked glasses together. The big Englishman was Colonel Archibald Campbell, afterwards known as Schipka Campbell, and there was a story told of these two, which is perhaps worth relating. They went up to Schumla together, and there for week after week they lived in a deadly monotony which was varied only by the intrusion of an occasional shell, hurled by one of the Russian guns from the other side of the river. “It's getting horribly dull here,” said the Frenchman one day. “Suppose we go and sit, by way of a change, on the fortifications and get shelled at.” The suggestion was probably made in a purely humorous mood, but the Scotchman chose to appear to take it seriously and said that it was a very good idea. In all likelihood the answer was as humorously meant as the suggestion, but each carried on the game with so much gravity that in the end they did actually go and sit upon the glacis, where they smoked their pipes until such time as a big shell burst between them, when the Frenchman hinted that they had done enough for honour, and the pair leisurely withdrew. And here I recall an experience of my own which befell me a year and a half later, but may perhaps best be dealt with now. I had been elected to the Savage Club, and one night I encountered there a number of old campaigning men—newspaper correspondents, artists, and doctors—who were swopping battle yarns among themselves, and who were all agreed with respect to one thing—the extraordinary exhilaration which came of being under fire. Now I have been under fire for weeks together in my time, and I am free to confess that I never liked it. I am going to be quite honest; I never showed the white feather, but I know quite well that many a time in the course of that campaign, if I could have bolted without disgracing myself in my own eyes, I should have done it. I stuck to my place because it was my place, but not in the least degree because I liked to be there, and all this talk about the exhilaration of being shot at, and the maddening pleasure inspired by it, hit me very hard indeed, and set me probing my own mind to ask if I were not, as a matter of fact, a coward who had just managed to disguise the truth from himself and others. I went out of the club that night in a melancholy mood, and as I was wandering purposelessly along the Strand, I felt a hand upon my shoulder and, turning round, saw Archibald.

Forbes beside me. “You look hit, young 'un,” said he, “come and have a drink.” He drew me into the Gaiety bar, and there, over a whisky and cigar, I unfolded my trouble. “My boy,” said Forbes, “I have been through seventeen campaigns, big and little, and I have had a bit of experience. You can make your mind quite easy, and the first thing you can do is to go back to your club and give those fellows my compliments—Archibald Forbes's compliments—and tell them that they are liars to a man!” I did not take that message, which was delivered in a form more emphatic than I have given to it, but I went away a good deal comforted. I have compared notes since then with many an old campaigner, and I have never talked seriously with one who has not been in the end willing to confess to a very serious knowledge of his position at such a time. In the course of a siege men get inured to it, but even then there is no particular fun about it, and merely to sit still and endure is anything but a cheerful experience; to be on the move towards the enemy is altogether another matter.

I remember, for instance, an incident which occurred at Guemlik, when a rifle bullet passed so close by my left ear, that for a minute or two I was deafened on that side, and the ear itself was hot with the passing of the bullet. I remember that I yelled out to the little party which accompanied me, “We're under fire!” and flinging myself from my horse, dragged him into the shelter of a coppice. We held a council of war there, and it was finally decided that we should ride straight into the village and trust to what might happen. I had been compelled by the military authorities to travel with an escort, and I had with me four mounted Zaptiehs, a sergeant, my interpreter, and a fellow-correspondent. We all remounted and made a rush at the village, which was not more than three hundred yards away. We tore along at the charge, and what with the speed and the risk and the uncertainty, it was certainly all very thrilling, and even in a sense enjoyable. When we clattered into the cobbled street, we found a solitary Bashi-Bazouk armed with a Winchester repeating rifle. Him, the sergeant of my escort questioned. “Had he fired a shot lately?” “Evvet,” said the insolent ruffian, with a grin, answering in the affirmative. “What had he fired at?” asked the sergeant. “A small bird,” was the answer. “Had he fired in the direction of the highway?” the sergeant asked him again. “Evvet,” once more. “And had he seen a party coming along the highway?” the sergeant asked. “Oh, Evvet!” The sergeant rode towards a dilapidated wattled fence and wrenched from it a thick stake with which he administered such a hiding to that Bashi-Bazouk as I never saw one man bestow upon another before or since.

Good old Father Stick seemed to play a very large part in the Turkish administration. On the march to Plevna, for example, I saw two high military dignitaries chastised in the presence of their fellow-officers. What they had done or failed to do I did not know, but I arrived upon the scene just in time to see each man step out in turn, fold his arms and with bent head submit himself to half a dozen resounding blows across the shoulders. It was no perfunctory ceremony, but the two took it quite quietly and went back to their separate posts of duty looking as if nothing at all had happened. A third example of the kind took place at the military hospital at Adrianople. Dr Bond Moore had charge there and one day I was with him when one of the irregular troops was brought in with a broken leg. The doctor dressed the limb with a dilution of carbolic acid and fixed it in a plaster bandage. He left the man fairly comfortable, and, through his interpreter, promised him a speedy recovery. But two days later, in the course of our rounds, we came upon the patient and found him in a state of dreadful suffering. On investigation it was found that the bandage had been changed and that the limb was hopelessly distorted, the toes being turned inwards in such a fashion that even had the man recovered he would have been a helpless cripple for the rest of his days. The bandage was huddled on anyhow, and Moore tore it away to discover to his horror, that the brown limb below it was hideously blanched and inflamed. It turned out on inquiry that a young Turkish haakim, who had watched the operation at which the limb was first set, had taken it into his head to rearrange the dressing before the plaster case in which the limb was bound had dried, and he had improved upon the process he had witnessed, pretty much as an intelligent monkey might have done, by applying a dressing of undiluted carbolic acid. I have rarely seen a man in such a towering rage as Bond Moore when he saw the full extent of the mischief which had been done. He was fertile in curses, but when he had exhausted all he knew or could invent on the spur of the moment, he begged me to send for my interpreter who arrived in a minute or two, and drew from the sufferer a description of the man who had so mishandled him. Bond Moore sent for that man, and having made sure of him, kicked him the whole length of the corridor and finally sent him flying down a lengthy flight of stairs, where, very fortunately for himself, he fell upon a load of hay which had just been delivered for the use of the cavalry regiment which was stabled below the hospital. The indignant haakim hobbled off straightway to the military commandant of the city and lodged a complaint as to the manner in which he had been treated by his English colleague. In less than a quarter of an hour he was back again and the Pasha with him, a little, black-avised man with a beard like wire, who bore a malacca cane in very truculent fashion. He was quivering with anger, and he demanded in fluent French an explanation from Bond Moore in a manner which was peremptory in the extreme. Bond Moore knew no more of French than he did of Turkish, but my interpreter having explained the position, the Pasha turned round upon the complainant and, after a few curt and angry questions, set about him with the malacca cane until he roared: “Amaan, Eccellenza, amaan!” (which, being interpreted, is “have pity,”) and finally took to his heels and ran for it with the irate little Pasha in full cry after him.

Of course it would be useless to deny the existence of the delight in battle which affects some natures, but I am perfectly sure that it does not come as the result of standing still to be shot at. I have seen some extraordinary examples of cool courage and at least one of perfect panic, but the circumstances in which I saw the last, disposed me to understand and to sympathise with it. We were quartered at Tashkesen shortly after our enforced retreat from Plevna. The village in which we lived was two or three miles from the actual front of war, and on a certain foggy morning I set out with a little hill pony to visit the fortifications. I may as well make one bite at the whole story, and to do this I must go back to the time when I was at Vienna and had just discovered that it was impossible to make my way to Schumla by the Danube. At the Englischer Hof Hotel in that city I met a gentleman who had for years been engaged in a military survey of the Balkan country. He had been under some sort of contract with the Turkish Government, but on the very eve of the campaign, the authorities had refused to pay him a sum of £12,000 which he reckoned to be due to him for his labours and expenses, and at considerable risk and difficulty he had contrived to smuggle his map out of Constantinople. He was on his way to St Petersburg with it and eventually disposed of it to the Russian Government. Without it the Russian army would never have been able ta force the passage of the Balkans and I always traced the defeat of the Turks to that poor economy of £12,000. The map was the most extraordinary thing of its kind I have ever seen. It consisted of a great number of thin wooden slabs of about a foot square on which were modelled in wax all the mountains and passes of the Balkan range, built exactly to scale and showing every road and bypath.

Now at Tashkesen the Russians were in possession of this map, with the result that they were able to adjust their guns to the precise range of positions which were out of sight. The road by which I travelled on that foggy morning was being swept by shell, the evident purpose being to prevent provisions and supplies from being carried along it to the troops in front. Probably from want of ammunition, the cannonade had been suspended from seven o'clock in the morning until about eleven, and I took advantage of this lull to attempt my visit to the fortifications. I was about half-way up the hill when a shell burst a few score yards in front of me; another and another followed. One which had been discharged at a higher elevation than the rest burst overhead, and I began to feel extremely nervous. I dismounted and led my pony into the wood on the right hand side. I had not penetrated ten yards into the wood when a shell burst in front of me and in something like panic I dragged my little steed across the road and sought a shelter in the wood on the opposite side. Crash! came a shell in front of me as I entered, and this time nearer than ever. Now it is one thing to be in imminent danger in the midst of your comrades or even when you have the companionship of a single friend, and it is another to find yourself surrounded by a ring of fire when you are absolutely alone and have nobody to lend you countenance. The memory of that time will always make me pitiful to the man who runs away. For one instant I was on the edge of an absolute surrender to physical fear. How I got a grip of myself I really do not know. I was certainly most horribly afraid and my nerve was almost gone, when I remembered that on a previous journey I had passed a great outcrop of granite rock, which afforded a perfect shelter. I reflected that it was just as dangerous to go back as to go on, and I estimated that my refuge was only two or three hundred yards in front of me. With this aim in mind, I mounted again and rode uphill as fast as my mount could carry me. When I reached my shelter the shells were howling and screaming and bursting everywhere, but I sat in perfect safety, and by and by recovered my self-possession. I had been there perhaps an hour and had begun to write an account of my morning's adventure when I heard a wild voice pealing down the road and the stumbling clatter of a horse's hoofs at a dangerous, breakneck speed, and the horseman passed and in his passage, swift as it was, we recognised each other. I knew the man quite well; he was an English doctor, and I felt as keen a pang of pity as I have ever experienced in my life as I recognised in him that condition of abject surrender to fear from which I had myself so recently escaped, Heaven alone knows how! I had touched the line and had somehow been saved from going over it; the man who went howling past me had touched the line and crossed it. He was holding on to the front of his saddle and his horse's reins were trailing loose and broken; his face was livid and he was yelling with sheer terror at the top of his voice. He was gone in a flash and I learned afterwards that within an hour of his arrival at the village, he put in his papers on some plea of urgency, and immediately went down country. Years afterwards I brought my wife to town to hear an afternoon lecture from Mr Bennett Burleigh, who was just back from one of his numerous campaigns. We were staying on for the theatre, and in the interim we dined at the Criterion, A gentleman in evening dress came in with a theatre party consisting of three ladies. He busied himself for a while in arranging his party and then sat down facing me. Our eyes met, and I do not remember to have seen a man more painfully embarrassed. He blushed until his very ears were pink, and if I could have found the courage I would have taken him aside and have made to him a confession which might possibly have soothed his mind.

A reputation for coolness in danger, like other reputations, is often got without much deserving. At the time of the Russo-Turkish war, the railway had its terminus a few miles beyond Tatar Bazardjik. I was travelling north with a party of English doctors and we alighted at the station there for refreshment. We had been misinformed about the length of time for which the train halted there and were hurriedly summoned by the guard when it was already in motion. The engine-driver slowed down until it was possible, by hard running, to overtake our carriage. I was in heavy riding boots and somewhat hampered by that fact, and just as my fingers touched the brass guard at the side of the compartment, I tripped on a ground wire and fell beneath the approaching train in such a fashion that the carriage wheel was actually between my thighs. I clutched the marche-pied with both arms and clung on with all my might. The revolving wheel was actually rubbing at the inside of my legs and the spurs were torn from the heels of my boots. How I executed the manoeuvre I shall never know, but before the train was brought to a standstill, I was on my knees on the marche-pied and was being helped into the railway carriage by one of my companions. I suppose that it must have been the most imminent moment of danger I have ever known, but I can testify quite honestly to one queer thing—I was absolutely without fear—and with a horrible death actually grazing me, I was as coolly self-possessed as I ever have been in the whole course of my life. But there was the shock of consciousness awaiting me. I was violently sick a moment later, and for nights and nights to come, I experienced a horrible nightmare, in which all the terrors which might have seemed natural to the situation laid hold upon me.

In the Grande Rue de Pera there was a cafÉ chantant which was run by one Napoleon Flam. There was a little silver hell attached to it where there was a roulette table with twenty-four numbers and a double zero. There were always plenty of flying strangers who were prepared to throw away their money here, and I fancy that the fat Greek who presided over the table made a fat thing of it. In the concert room, the superannuated artistes of the poorer kind of Continental concert hall shrieked and grimaced and ogled, and after every item of the show, the performer came round with an escallop shell into which the more generously disposed dropped small copper coins. The place was nearly always crowded with men in black frock-coats and crimson fezzes. Ill-starred Valentine Baker had been employed by the Sublime Porte to create an English gendarmerie, and this fact had brought a large number of English military men into Constantinople, who were anxious to enlist under his banner. Many of them were men who had done good service in their day and held unblemished records, but there is no disguising the fact that a large contingent of the discredited riffraff of the British army was collected in the city at that time. The “Concert Flam” was the accepted rendezvous for both sets, and on my second night in Constantinople I went thither in company with the young Irish-German officer, of whom I have already spoken, and an American newspaper correspondent who had been in the city long enough to know the ropes.

Young Von A. was a big, genial fellow, full of animal spirits, and on this particular occasion, Bacchi plenus. He was under the impression that all the little swarthy men who sat about him in their red fezzes and their black frock-coats were Turks, He was boiling over with enthusiasm for the Turkish cause, and he had picked up a patriotic phrase or two. The spirit moved him to rise in an interval of the stage performance and to bawl out aloud the words:

“Chokularishah Padishah,” which, being interpreted, signifies, “May the Sultan live for ever!” His enthusiasm was not contagious, for the assembly consisted almost entirely of people who did not care a copper whether the Sultan lived for ever or died next morning. There were lifted eyebrows and cynical stares, but the young gentleman was not in a condition to regard these and he went on to cry: “muscove dormous!” signifying that a Russian was a hog, and drawing a masonic forefinger across his throat to indicate what, in his opinion, ought to be done with him. The youngster stood there, big and burly and jolly, and meaning, I am quite sure, no harm to anybody, when a little Greek, who was seated opposite to him, said, “Je suis muscove, monsieur,” and the lad leant across the marble table and aimed a mock buffet at him which unfortunately reached him and rolled him over as if he had been a ninepin. At the “Concert Flam” a porcelain coffee cup weighed something like a quarter of a pound, and half a dozen of these came hurling at the offender from various parts of the room. There were big mirrors all round the cafÉ reaching from the ceiling to the dado; one or two of these were smashed, and, before one could say “Jack Robinson,” the wildest disorder reigned and all the place was in a melee. The nine or ten Englishmen who were there ranged themselves round the originator of the disturbance, who was really in some momentary danger. The whole posse of us formed into an irregular ring in the centre of the room, and for a while we had quite a merry time of it. There were flags of all nationalities hung about the little hall dependent from short wooden lances with gilt heads, and these our assailants tore down and used as weapons against us. The conflict was brief and decisive; numerically there were perhaps six to one against us, but we ended by forming in lines, and the barbarous English fashion of striking straight from the shoulder sent the enemy in a hurry towards the narrow and winding stair which afforded the only exit from the place, and here, in the exhilaration of the moment, two of our party did an unguarded thing; they took to dropping the fugitives in the rear over the banister on to the heads and shoulders of the crowd below. We were left masters of the field but, as it happened, the “Concert Flam” was situated right opposite to the lowest Greek quarter, the Rue Yildiji, I think it was called, and it was approached under a low arch by a dirty flight of stone steps. Up these steps thronged a great crowd of people armed with anything they could snatch up at the moment—frying-pans, pokers, fire shovels, and any article of domestic use which at short notice might be turned into a weapon of defence. Luckily for us there was one cool head amongst us. Schipka Campbell, who had not then earned the title by which he was afterwards so widely known, was there, and he took command of the party. We were all armed, but though we displayed our weapons for the intimidation of the mob we were gravely cautioned not to fire a shot on peril of our lives. The Grande Rue de Pera was raging when we reached it, but we slipped out one by one, each man revolver in hand, and ranged ourselves against the wall. I cannot recall that a solitary blow was struck, but I know that the people in the rear of the crowd were in a mighty hurry to get at us and that those in front were in equal haste to retire, and little by little we made our way to the Byzance Hotel where the gates were closed and barred against the crowd. Shortly afterwards the Chief of the Consular Police was amongst us making inquiries into the origin of the Émeute. He took an official note of the occurrence and drank a glass of wine or two and smoked a cigar with us, but we never heard any more about the business, and though we strolled thereafter into the “Concert Flam” quite freely, we suffered no molestation.