Off to Widdin—Strong Fortifications—Osman Pasha in Command—The Kalafatians at Work—Dr. Black—A Discreditable Englishman—Shooting on Sight—An Arrest and a Release—"Life off Black"—Egyptian Troops arrive—Zara Dilber Effendi—Osman Pasha's Ball—A Memorable Function—I get Plenty of Partners—Military Wall-flowers—The Ladies of Widdin—The Dance before the Fight—Three Beautiful Roumanians—An Angry Grandfather—Lambro Redivivus—Preparing for the Campaign—Some Forcible Dentistry—Religion of the Turks—The Wrestlers—Visitors from Kalafat—I pay a Return Call—Across the Danube into Kalafat—Dinner with the Roumanians—Pumping the Guileless Stranger—A Futile Effort—Frank Power—Nicholas Leader—Edmund O'Donovan—Wild Duck Shooting.

A march of four days brought us to Widdin, the journey being accomplished by easy stages and with a fair degree of comfort. Of course it must be remembered that there was no such thing as a commissariat department in the Turkish army. The zaptiehs, or mounted police, in each district received notice of our approach, and requisitioned the necessary supplies from the farmers, who received acknowledgments of Government indebtedness for the amount due. We always sent forward a few arabas with an advance party and a number of cooks; so that when the regiment reached the camping-place for the night all the preparations were made, and a hot meal was ready for the men. We usually camped in a Bulgarian village; and if there was no other shelter for the men, we appropriated the mosque, and made up our beds in it. I have slept many a time on the paved floor of a Turkish mosque, in the very arms of Islam as it were; and I must candidly admit that my slumbers were quite as refreshing and my dreams as sweet as they have since been within sound of the cathedral bells of Christendom.

Widdin is a town of considerable commercial importance, and a strongly fortified position of great military significance, being, in fact, one of the keys of Bulgaria, for it is situated on a wedge of Bulgarian territory, having both the Servian and Roumanian frontiers almost under the muzzles of its siege-guns. When we were there the population numbered about fourteen thousand persons, of whom perhaps one-half were Bulgarians, one-third Turks, and the remainder Levantines, Greeks, Italians, Spanish Jews, and Tchiganes or Gypsies. There are a great number of Jews everywhere throughout the Turkish Empire, and they are very well treated by the Turks. It is hardly necessary to say that almost all the bankers and financial agents in the country belong to this race.

There are practically two towns in Widdin—namely, that which is within the fortifications, and that which is outside. The fortified portion faces the Danube, which forms its protection for a distance of about one mile; and it is defended besides by a high castellated wall fully twenty feet in height, which runs right round the town. Facing the Danube, when we were there, were several powerful and perfectly organized batteries, armed with at least fifty Krupp siege-guns of the most modern description. From the Danube side the town was practically impregnable. On the other side, beyond the castellated wall, was a wide and deep moat; and over this was a drawbridge, which was pulled up at six o'clock every night, so that after that hour ingress to the fortified town was impossible until the morning. Inside the fortress were the principal public buildings, including the konak, or townhall, the seat of administration of the Turkish governor in charge of the vilayet, as well as the barracks, which accommodated four thousand men, a large Government mill for grinding corn, and the great granaries in which a reserve of grain was stored for victualling the town in the event of a siege.

The greater portion of the population lived outside the fortress in the different suburbs; and beyond these again was the outer line of defence, a huge wall of earth about twenty feet high, and studded at short intervals with redoubts. Outside this wall the country was low-lying and swampy, capable of being flooded from the Danube, and thus affording additional protection to the town. One result, however, of all this circumjacent water was that Widdin was one of the most unhealthy towns in the whole of Turkey. The climate was excessively damp, and we were never free from malarial fever. At one time there were no fewer than four hundred men in the hospitals with this fever.

A staple article of export from Widdin is caviare, which is obtained in enormous quantities from the roe of the sturgeon, and sent away packed in barrels on board the flat-bottomed boats that ply up the river. I have seen a sturgeon fully twelve feet long caught in the Danube. Three men were dragging it with a rope through the streets of Widdin. The town has also a great reputation for its filigree work in silver and gold, which is very beautiful.

In February, 1877, when our regiment reached Widdin, we found about thirty thousand Turkish troops in the place, mostly infantry, though there were a few batteries of field artillery and about a thousand cavalry. The Kyrchehir Regiment went into quarters in the barracks inside the fortress; but of course there was not sufficient accommodation there for all the troops in the town, and a military encampment was formed a couple of miles out of the town for the bulk of the army corps. Osman Pasha, at that time a comparatively unknown man, was then commander-in-chief of all the troops in Widdin, and Adil Pasha was the commandant in charge of the camp. Osman Pasha had already won considerable reputation by his brilliant defeat of the Servians at Zaitchar; but it was not until his subsequent successes against the Russian arms that his name was flashed through the length and breadth of Europe, and that congratulations poured in upon him from all quarters. It fell to my lot to open and read many of the letters sent to him from England, in which the writers, a large proportion of whom were ladies, expressed their admiration for his gallantry and begged the favour of his autograph. Osman Pasha lived in a large house within the fortress, and I myself was billeted in the same quarter, where I lived quite in the Turkish fashion, sitting cross-legged on the floor and eating my food with my fingers.

At this time hostilities with Servia had ceased, and a long armistice had been declared, during which the Powers were occupied in dictating terms to Turkey, which, however, she declined to accept, her determined attitude in the matter leading ultimately to the declaration of war against her by Russia. The town of Kalafat in Roumania is close to Widdin; and we could see the Roumanian troops there busily engaged in fortifying it in anticipation of hostilities breaking out, and of an attack being made on the town by the forces in Widdin at any moment. The position, therefore, was decidedly interesting, for we could actually see the Roumanians, who were nominally our vassals, building up their redoubts against us as fast as they could. It will be remembered that during the early part of the Crimean war the Turks occupied Kalafat, Osman Pasha being the commander of the forces; and that the Russians lost some twenty thousand men in a vain attempt to take it.

The time of waiting in Widdin was fairly quiet, although every one felt that war was in the air, and that the interval of rest was only the hush that precedes the hurricane. I had plenty of work to do, for dysentery and lung troubles affected the troops severely as well as malarial fever. There were about thirty military surgeons in the town including myself, but most of them were Hungarians or Austrians; and the only other British subject among them besides myself was a man whom I shall call Dr. Black, although that was not his name.

Dr. Black was by no means a credit to his country. In fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was a perfect disgrace; and as every fresh scrape that he got into reflected more or less upon me, I began to get heartily sick of him. Few of the people in Widdin had ever seen an Englishman, and Dr. Black's manners and customs were not calculated to prejudice them favourably with regard to the nation in general or myself in particular. Fortunately for me there was one other Briton in the town. To use a convenient Irishism, he was a Scotsman, and he was commonly known as Jack; in fact, I never heard his surname. Jack was a high-class mechanical engineer, and he had been specially imported from Glasgow to take charge of the Government flour-mill inside the fortress. He lived there with his wife, a charming little Scotswoman, and they both spoke Turkish like natives. I had many consultations with Jack as to our common bÊte noir Dr. Black; but we had to suffer in silence for a while until the whirligig of time brought its revenges, and Dr. Black was at last turned out of Widdin.

I had met Dr. Black before in Sofia, and it was with intense disgust that I came across him again in Widdin. He was a middle-aged man, who might possibly have been of some good in his profession when he was younger; but he had spoiled his life and ruined his chances with drink. He was the most awful drunkard I have ever met. In fact, he was never sober, and in his habits he was perfectly filthy. He used to wear a long, dirty overcoat, in one pocket of which he invariably carried a bottle of the commonest and vilest rum, while in the other he carried a loaded revolver, with which he would blaze away at any one who gave him the slightest provocation. On one occasion I saw him stagger into a Bulgarian boot shop and yell out in English to the proprietor, "Give me a pair of boots, you ——!" Of course the Bulgarian could not understand, so Black whipped out his revolver and blazed a few cartridges away among the stock in trade before the trembling cobbler could pacify him. He was perpetually firing off this weapon, and he was such a terror to the unfortunate Bulgarians in whose houses he was quartered, that he was never allowed to stay more than a week at a time in one place. At last he became such a nuisance that old Hassib Bey, a most courtly old Turkish gentleman, who was the head of the hospital, sent for me, and asked me what on earth they were to do with this compatriot of mine. I suggested that he should be quartered in the military hospital, where he would have fewer opportunities of being a nuisance, and my suggestion, which was adopted, speedily brought matters to a crisis.

One night, when Dr. Black had retired to rest in the military hospital, drunk as usual, a number of mischievous jarra bashis, dispensers and dressers, began to tease him by hammering at his door and making offensive remarks to him. He yelled out to them in English that if they did not desist he would bring out the inevitable revolver; but they could not tear themselves away from the fascinating sport of baiting a boozer; and suddenly, as they were gathered outside in the passage whistling, cat-calling, and shouting out uncomplimentary epithets, the door opened, and Dr. Black appeared in his night-shirt, revolver in hand. There was a frightened stampede down the passage, and as they fled Black emptied the revolver at random at his assailants. A piercing shriek told that one of the bullets at any rate had gone home, and presently the whole hospital was in an uproar, as a little Italian dresser staggered into the house surgeon's room declaring that he was murdered. A hasty examination, however, showed that the bullet had entered a portion of the anatomy where it could do little harm, namely, the fleshy tissues adjacent to the base of the spine, and no attempt was made to extract it. Probably that little Italian dresser carries the bullet about in his back still as a souvenir of campaigning days in Widdin.

When Dr. Black put his head out of his door next morning, he found a couple of soldiers stationed there waiting to arrest him; so he retreated inside the room again, and devised a plan of escape. The window of the room looked out over a courtyard about fourteen feet below; and as there was a thick layer of snow in the yard, Black decided to escape that way. He knotted his blanket into a rope, and dropped into the yard—also into the arms of the sentry stationed below. He was brought before old Hassib Bey, who sent for me; and I sent for Jack the mill engineer to act as interpreter. Finally Hassib Bey decided that it would be no good to put Black in gaol, and to my intense delight he resolved to send him away out of Widdin altogether. He treated my discreditable compatriot most generously, for he had him placed on board one of the large river steamers which plied once a week from Widdin up as far as Belgrade, and sent him away scot-free after his escapade, and with £10 in his pocket to carry him out of Turkish territory as soon as possible. I thanked Hassib Bey for his forbearance, and to my great joy I never saw Dr. Black again.

When my regiment was sent out of the fortress to the encampment, I was detailed for hospital duty, and took up my quarters at a small fifth-rate Bulgarian hotel on the banks of the Danube. The principal diversion was to go on board the big passenger steamers, and hear the news of the outside world and what people were saying of us in England. I met a charming Frenchman on board one of them, a highly cultured and agreeable military man, named Captain Bouchon, who was going down to Rustchuk. However, I persuaded him to stop with me for a week, and his society gave me the greatest pleasure.

The first war correspondent whom I met in Widdin was a man named Fitzgerald, who came out as the representative of the London Standard. He was a fine fellow, and had seen service in the British army. It was the month of April when he arrived, among the first of the petrels who presaged the coming storm; and about the same time there came two battalions of Egyptian troops under Prince Hassan, the Khedive's second son. These made a strong reinforcement for the large body of troops already in Widdin. One day Fitzgerald came to me, and said that he was going away up the river for a few days. He asked me to look after his correspondence, and to send any items of news worth telegraphing to the Standard. He took the boat, and went away leaving me in charge, and I have never seen him from that day to this. I took up his work, and sent several messages during the campaign which followed to the Standard, spending a considerable sum of money out of my own pocket upon telegraphing. Afterwards, when I got down to Constantinople and explained matters to Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, a well known personality there, he refunded me the money.

When the Egyptian troops arrived, they naturally occasioned a good deal of stir, and they were keenly criticised by their Turkish allies. For physique and fighting qualities there could be no comparison between the two bodies of men, the Turks easily carrying off the palm. Still, the Egyptians were by no means to be despised. Their officers were highly trained and intelligent, and the equipment of the troops was new and good, far superior, in fact, to that of the Turkish soldiers. Moreover, the Egyptian force brought with it an excellent band of brass and strings, which proved a perfect god-send, as we had no band among all the Turkish forces, and the bugles were not particularly agreeable to listen to. The Egyptians afterwards behaved well in action, and many of them fought at the defence of Widdin under Izzet Pasha, who successfully beat off the repeated assaults of the Roumanians and the Servians, and preserved the town intact.

Among the many interesting men who were gathered together in Widdin during this period of waiting and watching was a singularly attractive and talented Armenian named Zara Dilber Effendi, who was a resident of the place and the chairman of the local chamber of commerce. He had been brought up in Germany, and spoke every European language with equal fluency. I became very intimate with him, and was a frequent visitor at his house, finding him thoroughly well informed and an intimate friend of Osman Pasha. In fact, Zara Dilber Effendi and Osman Effendi, a Turkish doctor who had been educated in Paris, and who was the best surgeon that I came in contact with during the whole of the campaign, were my constant companions during my stay in Widdin, as my medical confrÈres, with the exception of two or three, had few tastes and no ideas in common with me. Dr. Kronberg and Dr. Busch, however, both capital fellows and married men, were sociable enough; and I have always attributed to the promptings of Madame Kronberg and Madame Busch a brilliant social idea which was developed by Osman Pasha immediately after the declaration of peace with Servia.

Civil and military society in the town was convulsed one day by the announcement that Osman Pasha intended to give a grand ball to celebrate the cessation of hostilities and in aid of the funds of the military hospitals. All the arrangements for the ball were left in the hands of Zara Dilber Effendi on the strength of that gentleman's intimate knowledge of the highest circles of European society; and as it was generally understood that Osman Pasha's invitations would be issued on the recommendation of Zara Dilber Effendi, the feminine world of Widdin was much fluttered. It leaked out pretty early that no one below the rank of a field officer would be invited, and we were kept on the tiptoe of excitement until the eventful night arrived. A fine Bulgarian house with a large room was taken for the night, and for a whole week beforehand Zara Dilber Effendi was missing. People said that he made several mysterious visits into Roumanian territory, bringing back each time a small army of Roumanian servants and many suggestive cases and packages. It was rumoured that there were to be chairs at the ball, and knives and forks. People whispered of a regular set supper, with European dishes and champagne. But Zara Dilber Effendi kept his own counsel, and went on his way, wrapped in impenetrable Oriental secrecy. As for myself, having received my invitation, I bought a brand new uniform, wondering a good deal where the ladies were to come from, and how the Turks would enjoy a ball carried out according to Western ideas. My invitation bore Osman Pasha's signature, and I sent this interesting souvenir out to my father in Australia afterwards.

When I entered the ballroom on that memorable night, I was fairly staggered. The room had been beautifully decorated by the Turkish and Egyptian troops with festoons of flags and picturesque devices composed of swords, rifles, revolvers, and arms of every kind. Upon a raised daÏs, at the end of the room, stood Osman Pasha in full-dress uniform, supported on either side by Madames Kronberg and Busch beautifully dressed. He received the guests with courtly politeness, shaking hands with each as they came up; and as the long line of brilliant uniforms sparkling with decorations, and of beautiful women dressed with exquisite taste, filed past in front 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" as when a recalcitrant cork comes out of a bottle of pale ale, and I was lying on my back in the trench among the arum lilies, with the forceps and the molar in my hand at last. As for the Turk, he spat the blood out of his mouth, piously remarked that Allah was very good, and went back to his company.

If any of my patients were seriously ill, or showed symptoms of malarial fever or dysentery, which was very prevalent, I had them placed in arabas, and sent back to the hospital in Widdin. Then, when my work of inspection was over, which was usually the case by about nine o'clock, the rest of the day was my own, and I spent it in improving my knowledge of Turkish and consuming large quantities of coffee and cigarettes with my brother officers. Every day the camp was in a state of great activity, with never ending drills and ceaseless inspections by the commandants, who spared no pains to see that everything was ready before the expected outbreak. The discipline throughout the camp was admirable, and the men were in excellent good humour.

Nearly every day I used to ride into Widdin to hear the news, and return to camp in the evening, generally reaching it before sunset. Only life in a Turkish camp can enable one to realize how deeply the Turks feel their religion, and how diligent they are in the practice of their devotions. No dour old Covenanter with a verse of a psalm on his lips ever flung himself with more dogged courage on the pikes of Graham of Claverhouse, than did those Turks charge down upon the Russian steel a few months later, with the cry of "Allah" upon their lips and the assurance of paradise in their heroic hearts. Perhaps the best qualification for a good soldier is to be a fanatic—as the next best is to be an infidel. After "Praise-God-Barebones," the most striking figure in a mÊlÉe is Sergeant Bothwell, who died "believing nothing, hoping nothing, fearing nothing." Every evening at the camp near Widdin the men were formed up in long, double lines just before sundown; and as the sun sank below the horizon the cry of "La ilaha illallah Mohammed Rasul Allah" started at one end of the lines, and was taken up by man after man, dying away in the distance diminuendo, and travelling back again crescendo, until it reached the starting-point in a mighty shout of religious fervour. The effect resembled nothing so much as a feu de joie of musketry, delivered with the precision and clearness attainable only by the daily practice of a lifetime.

When the men were dismissed from this mighty church parade, they would scamper off like so many schoolboys, and indulge in all kinds of games with the keen joy of living, and the unblunted faculties of sensation which are seldom found in the alcohol-drinkers of other nations. Wrestling was a favourite pastime with the men; and it was no uncommon sight to see five thousand spectators gathered in a huge ring, in the centre of which picked competitors, stripped to the waist, engaged each other in a catch-as-catch-can struggle. Hassan Labri Pasha, one of the principal officers in the camp, was an enthusiast in the sport of wrestling, and used to get up great tournaments in which the men wrestled each other for prizes of tobacco and other inexpensive little luxuries.

After three weeks of this life in camp, I was ordered back to Widdin again, and took up my quarters at the little Bulgarian hotel on the bank of the Danube where I had been before. Things were looking very serious at this time; and though war was not actually declared by Russia until April 24, 1877, still it was quite certain long before this date that Roumania would espouse the Russian cause; and when the Russian army which had been quartered on the Pruth entered Roumanian territory, the Government of the Porte communicated with the Roumanian Government, intimating that they construed the act of Roumania in allowing Russian troops to cross her frontier as an act of hostility towards Turkey.

About a week before the declaration of war, two Roumanian officers came down the Danube from Kalafat, and landed at my hotel, where they were stopped and told that they could go no farther. One of them was a Captain Giorgione, whom I met and asked to dine with me before he went back to Kalafat. He accepted my invitation, and after a long and pleasant conversation about the general situation and the prospects of war he gave me a cordial invitation to go across the river to Kalafat and pay him a visit in his quarters. As hostilities were expected to break out at any moment, no one was allowed to cross the Danube from our side without a special permit from Osman Pasha; and as there was no probability that he would grant me the necessary permission, I determined to make the trip on my own account. Possibly this was an indiscretion on my part; but indiscretions are apt to be the most enjoyable things in life, and I was getting tired of the humdrum routine of the camp. I had my English passport with me, which ensured my safe conduct until the actual declaration of hostilities; and armed with this precious document, I got one of my colleagues to act as locum tenens during my temporary absence from my practice, and hired a boat and a crew of boatmen to take me over the river, which at this point is nearly a mile wide, and flows with a current of extraordinary velocity. I dressed myself in a suit of mufti, but had no hat, and must have presented rather a piebald appearance with a Turkish fez surmounting a suit of English tweed. The Roumanian customs officers stared at me pretty hard, but they franked me through on my English passport, and I went into Kalafat, leaving my boatmen on the Roumanian side of the river to bring me back the same night.

I strolled into a cafÉ in Kalafat, which was then a town of about three thousand people; and the experience of living again in the European fashion, eating at a table, sitting on a chair, and seeing men in ordinary coats and trousers and hard black hats, struck me with all the charm of the unexpected. I felt the sensation of a Robinson Crusoe transplanted suddenly from his desert island and set down in the HÔtel Bristol.

Almost the first person that I met after I had finished breakfast was my friend Captain Giorgione, who expressed his delight at seeing me, and took me off at once to introduce me to the general commanding the division, after which I went to the captain's quarters in a house in the town. Most of the ordinary residents of Kalafat had already left the place, fearing that the bombardment of the town by the Widdin batteries was imminent, and the houses were filled with Roumanian officers and men. I lunched with Captain Giorgione and his brother officers, many of whom spoke German, and evinced a capacity for hearing news which was hardly disinterested. However, they were excessively polite, and in the afternoon we strolled on the promenade, and listened to the strains of an excellent military band.

As evening drew in my conscience began to trouble me, and I had the qualms of a schoolboy who has broken bounds, thinking of Osman Pasha and the remarks that he would be likely to make if he found out where I was. However, my newly found friends would not hear of my leaving them that day, and insisted upon my staying to dinner, at which I was given the seat of honour next to the general. What a capital dinner that was! Perhaps I enjoyed it all the more from the little circumstance that Osman Pasha might have me shot as soon as I got back. The Roumanian band played English airs in my honour, and the officers kept my glass always filled with Pommery. By the time we had reached the walnuts I found myself developing a surprising talent for mendacity, and the more questions that my polite hosts asked me the more astonishing grew my answering taradiddles. Of course they tried to pump me as to the number and disposition of the Turkish troops, and of course, guileless youth that I was, I lied wholesale. Even when I had put down the troops in Widdin at a hundred thousand men and expanded the artillery to four hundred guns, I was almost as astonished at my own moderation as they were at the magnitude of the force which Turkey had already mobilized in Widdin. One of the Roumanian surgeons who was at that dinner was green with envy when he discovered that I ranked as a major in the Turkish army while he was graded as a lieutenant. We had a very merry night of it, and I hope that all the fibs I told will not be remembered against me. Then at daybreak I made my way to the river, found my boatmen, and was back by six o'clock at my hotel with no one a bit the wiser for my escapade.

I met some interesting men at Widdin just before the war, notably a splendid young fellow named Frank Power—who, by the way, was a nephew of the late Sir Peter Lalor, once speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and long ago a picturesque figure in the fight at the Eureka Stockade near Ballarat. Frank Power was a young Irishman, who had joined the Austrian military service, but afterwards was sent up to Widdin to act as war correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. He lived with me; and I found him a most delightful companion, full of romance, and generously endowed with the love of adventure, and the enthusiasm, fire, and wit which are characteristic of the best Irishmen. He was a splendid rider and keen all-round sportsman, had read widely if not deeply, and with the mercurial temperament of the adventurer he combined more than a trace of the artist nature. He had the happiest knack of producing charming sketches in black-and-white or water-colours of bits of picturesque Bulgarian peasant life, groups of Turkish soldiery, or glimpses of the iris-spangled country that was soon to be coloured in a deeper dye. Poor Power was almost heart-broken when they sent up Nicholas Leader from Constantinople to replace him as the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He returned to Vienna, and thence to Dublin, where he resumed his old journalistic life for a time. But to such a man as Power a life of comparative inactivity was impossible; and when the troubles broke out in the Soudan, he soon found his way over there, and eventually reached Khartoum, where General Gordon appointed him British consul. Shortly before the fall of Khartoum, Gordon sent him down the Nile in a steamer with Colonel Stewart and an Arab escort to take despatches to the force advancing to the relief of Khartoum. However, before the steamer had got far the smouldering fires of disaffection among the natives on board broke into flame, and they succeeded in running the steamer aground. Lured by the friendly demonstrations of the Arabs on the shore, Colonel Stewart and Frank Power went ashore with their escort while efforts were being made to lighten the steamer and float her off again. The full details of what followed will never be known with certainty; but news of a massacre reached the British column eventually, and the bearers of the despatches were among the missing. Those who are familiar with Dervish methods may picture for themselves the sudden rush of bloodthirsty fanatics, the desperate hand-to-hand combat, and the deaths of Colonel Stewart and of my gallant young comrade when they fell pierced by Arab lances on the scorched and dreadful desert that lies along the banks of the Nile from Wady Halfa to Khartoum.

Nicholas Leader, who was sent up from Constantinople to take Frank Power's place in Widdin, had already had an adventurous career, and had smelt powder in many lands. After seeing service with the British troops in Canada, he resigned on the declaration of war by France upon Germany in 1870, and took service with the French arms. He was attached to the ill fated army of Bourbaki, and was interned with other prisoners of war in Switzerland. Afterwards, when the Carlist insurrection broke out in Spain, he joined the standard of Don Carlos, and took part in the fierce guerilla warfare which the Carlists waged against the Spanish Government. The war correspondents of those fighting days in Spain were as dare-devil a crew as ever lived; and Leader described to me with many a laugh the circumstances under which he first met Edmund O'Donovan, another Irishman, as gay and reckless as himself. Leader was in command of a small fort in the north of Spain during the height of the insurrection, when one day he espied a strange figure clad in a long, dilapidated overcoat approaching the walls. The Spanish sentries yelled to the suspicious visitor to halt; and as he took no notice of them, they fired on him, and the bullets kicked up the dust all round the stranger. The only result, however, was that he increased his pace, and came on at the double until he reached the walls off the fort amid a rain of bullets. "Cease firing, ye blackguards!" he shouted in the simple dialect of Southern Cork. "I'm Edmund O'Donovan, and how the blazes can I get in unless you open the gate!" Leader was summoned to interpret the strange language of the foreigner, and he let him in. Thus it was that Edmund O'Donovan, who was attached to the Government troops, walked alone into the enemy's fortress.

Nicholas Leader, after all his wanderings, found a grave in Turkish soil; for after a few weeks in Widdin, he joined the army of Suleiman Pasha at the Shipka Pass, and died there of fever.

About the time that Leader left Widdin the town was in a state of suppressed excitement, for every one knew that the declaration of war was imminent, and the slightest incident was sufficient to cause a demonstration.

Once I went with two others by boat to a small island on the Danube, where there were numbers of wild duck. We got to work upon them in great style, and soon had a full bag; but when we were in the middle of the fun, half a squadron of Roumanian cavalry came galloping down to the opposite bank to see what the firing was about. It would not have taken much at that moment to provoke a conflict.