Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

These droll irregulars never took much pains about parading. Neither smartness nor uniformity was a desideratum. The fellows dressed how they liked, or rather, perhaps, how they could: their only weapon, besides the revolver, a Martini-Henry rifle, each man carried as seemed unto him best, providing that he carried it somehow, somewhere about himself or his pony. The only uniform accoutrement was the bandoleer in which the cartridges were carried. When they got ready, they mounted; when he found around him a reasonable number of mounted men, the leader of the corps started; his fellows followed in files, and the men who were late overtook the detachment at a canter. No man skulked; the majority were keen enough for fighting, and the funkers, if there were any, had to pretend to be as zealous as their comrades. Buller and Beresford were always in the saddle early, waiting for the firstlings of the muster. Buller’s favourite mount was a fiddle-headed, brindled, flat-sided, ewe-necked cob named Punch. He was perhaps the very ugliest horse of his day and generation in all South Africa, but he was also among the most valuable. Although not very fast, his endurance was wonderful; he made nothing of a hundred miles at a stretch, with an occasional “off-saddle” and a roll as the only relief; but it was neither his endurance nor his ugliness that constituted his special value. He was “salted” to the third degree of saltness; he was a veritable “mark mason” among “salted” horses. Now salt-horse in the South African sense has no affinity with the salt-horse at which sailors grumble. The “salted horse” of the veldt is an animal which is proof against the pestilence known as “horse-sickness.” He rarely survives the attack; after one attack he is still liable to another, but less liable; he may have three attacks, and if he yet lives, he is of the loftiest aristocracy of “saltness,” and proof for all time against horse-sickness. If that were the only ill that horse-flesh is heir to, he would be immortal. Beresford had lost one horse by a Zulu bullet, another by horse-sickness; but cavalry-man and steeplechase rider as he was, he was not the man to be badly mounted. He rode a smart chestnut, with the Irish Birdcatcher white ticks on his withers and flanks. The leader of the irregulars and his staff-officer sat on their horses in front of Evelyn Wood’s tent, waiting for their fellows to come on the ground. Wood, standing in his tent-door, chatted to the laconic Buller, while Beresford and “the boy”--young Lysons, Wood’s A.D.C., was “the boy”--gossiped a little apart. Presently Baker came along at the head of his assortment of miscreants; Ferreira leading his particular bandits, was visible in the offing, and Buller, alongside of Baker, headed the procession of horsemen down toward the river, Beresford temporarily remaining to see the turnout complete and close up the command. Before Buller was at the waterside, he had galloped up to the head of the column, for it was his place, as ever, to lead the advance; Buller bringing on the main body behind the scouts.

The arrangements were simple; and there was no delay down by the Umvaloosi bank, where the accelerated fire from the Zulus in the kopjie over against them whistled over the heads of the horsemen; over whom too screamed the shells from the guns in front of the laager that were being thrown in among the crags where the Zulus lurked. The spray of the Umvaloosi dashed from the horse-hoofs of the irregulars, as they forded the river on the right of the kopjie, and then bending to the left round it, took it in reverse. The Zulus who had been holding it had not cared much for the shell fire, ensconced among the rocks as they were, but were quick to notice the risk they ran of being cut off by the movement of the horsemen, and made a bolt of it. Beresford’s fellows galloped hard to intercept them, Bill well in front, sending his chestnut along as if he were “finishing” in front of the stand at Sandown. The Zulu ïnduna, bringing up the rear of his fleeing detachment, turned on the lone man who had so outridden his followers. A big man, even for a Zulu, the ring round his head proved him a veteran. The muscles rippled on his glistening black shoulders as he compacted himself behind his huge flecked shield of cowhide, marking his distance for the thrust of the gleaming assegai held at arm’s length over the great swart head of him. Bill steadied his horse a trifle, just as he was wont to do before the take off for a big fence; within striking distance he made him swerve a bit to the left--he had been heading straight for the Zulu, as if he meant to ride him down. The spear flashed out like the head of a cobra as it strikes; the sabre carried at “point one” clashed with it, and seemed to curl round it; the spear-head was struck aside; the horseman delivered “point two” with all the vigour of his arm, his strong seat, and the impetus of his galloping horse; and lo! in the twinkling of an eye, the sabre’s point was through the shield, and half its length buried in the Zulu’s broad chest. The brave ïnduna was a dead man before he dropped; the sword drawing out of his heart as he fell backward. His assegai stands now in the corner of Bill’s mother’s drawing-room.

Beresford’s Zulu was the only man slain with the “white arm” in hand-to-hand combat during the day, but of the fugitives whom the dead ïnduna had commanded, several fell under the fire of the fellows who followed that chief’s slayer. The surviving Zulus ran into the nearest military kraal, Delyango. Out of it the irregulars rattled them, as well as the few Zulus who had been garrisoning it. A detachment had been left behind--a fortunate precaution taken by Buller--to cover the retreat by holding the kopjie in the rear; and then the force--Beresford and his scouts still leading, the main body spread out on rather a broad front--galloped on through the long grass across the open, bending rather leftward in the direction of the Nodwengo, the next military kraal in the direction of Ulundi. In front of the horsemen there kept retiring at a pace regulated by theirs, about two hundred Zulus, all who were then visible anywhere on the face of the plain. These shunned Nodwengo, leaving it on their right, and heading straight for Ulundi. The irregulars drew rein long enough for a patrol to ride into Nodwengo and report it empty. Then the horses having got their wind, the rapid advance recommenced. It really seemed a straight run in for Buller and Beresford as they set their horses’ heads for Ulundi and galloped on. The idea had occurred to many in the force that Cetewayo must have abandoned his capital and withdrawn his army into the hill country close behind Ulundi.

Those irregular horsemen had no very keen sense of discipline, and in a gallop, a forward gallop especially, were rather prone to get out of hand. Buller’s hardest task was to restrain this impulse, and it was well that day that he was exerting himself all he knew to curb the ardour of his fellows. Beresford’s advance-detachment, scouts as they were, were of course straggled out rather casually over the whole front. Everything seemed prosperous. No enemy showed anywhere save the two hundred fugitive Zulus, falling back ahead of our fellows at the long easy run which takes the Zulu over the ground with surprising speed and which he can keep up hour after hour without a symptom of distress.

Their flight was a calculated snare; those fugitives were simply a wily decoy. Suddenly from out a deep, sharply-cut water-course crossing the plain, and invisible at two hundred yards’ distance, sprang up a long line of Zulus, some two thousand strong, confronting at once and flanking the horsemen. Simultaneously the whole plain around them flashed up into vivid life. Hordes of Zulus had been lying hidden in the long grass. Buller’s alert eye had caught the impending danger, and his voice had rung out the command “Retire” ere yet the bullets of the sudden Zulu volley whistled through and over his command. Three men went down smitten by the fire. Two were killed on the spot and never stirred; we found their bodies next day shockingly mangled. The third man’s horse slipped up in the abrupt turn, and his rider for the moment lay stunned. But Beresford, riding away behind his retreating party, looked back at this latter man, and saw him move up into a sitting posture.

He who would succour in such a crisis must not only be a brave man, but also a prompt man, quick to decide and as quick to act. The issue of life or death hangs at such a time on the gain or waste of a moment. The Zulus, darting out from the water-course, were perilously close to the poor fellow; but Beresford, used on the racecourse to measuring distance with the eye, thought he might just do it, if he were smart and lucky. Galloping back to the wounded man, he dismounted, and ordered him to get on his pony. The wounded man, dazed as he was, even in his extremity was not less full of self-abnegation than was the man who was risking his own life in the effort to save his. He bade Beresford remount and go; why, he said in his simple manly logic--why should two die when death was inevitable but to one? Then it was that the quaint resourceful humour of his race supplied Beresford with the weapon that prevailed over the wounded man’s unselfishness. The recording angel perhaps did not record the oath that buttressed his threatening mien when he swore with clenched fist that he would punch the wounded man’s head if he did not allow his life to be saved. This droll argument prevailed. Bill partly lifted, partly hustled the man into his saddle, then scrambled up somehow in front of him, and set the good little beast agoing after the other horsemen. He only just did it; another moment’s delay and both must have been assegaied. As it was, the swift-footed Zulus chased them up the slope, and the least mistake made by the pony must have been fatal. Indeed, as Beresford was the first gratefully to admit, there was a critical moment when their escape would have been impossible, but for the cool courage of Sergeant O’Toole, who rode back to the rescue, shot down Zulu after Zulu with his revolver as they tried to close in on the rather helpless pair, and then aided Beresford in keeping the wounded man in the saddle until the safety of the laager was attained. There was danger right up till then; for the hordes of Zulus obstinately hung on the flanks and rear of Buller’s command, and the irregulars had over and over again to shoot men down at close quarters with the revolver; more than once the fighting was hand-to-hand and they had to club their rifles. If the Zulus had kept to their own weapon, the assegai, the loss among Buller’s men would have been very severe; but they had extensively armed themselves with rifles that had fallen into their hands at Isandlwana, with the proper handling of which they were unfamiliar. They pursued right up to their own bank of the Umvaloosi, and blazed away at our fellows long after the river was between them and us. Of course, cumbered with a wounded and fainting man occupying his saddle while he perched on the pommel, Beresford was unable to do anything toward self-protection, and over and over again on the return ride, he and the man behind him were in desperate strait, and but for O’Toole and other comrades must have gone down. When they alighted in the laager you could not have told whether it was rescuer or rescued who was the wounded man, so smeared was Beresford with borrowed blood. It was one of Ireland’s good days; if at home she is the “distressful country,” wherever bold deeds are to be done and military honour to be gained, no nation carries the head higher out of the dust. If originally Norman, the Waterford family have been Irish now for six centuries, and Bill Beresford is an Irishman in heart and blood. Sergeant Fitzmaurice, the wounded man who displayed a self-abnegation so fine, was an Irishman also; and Sergeant O’Toole--well, I think one runs no risk in the assumption that an individual who bears that name, in spite of all temptation, remains an Irishman. So, in this brilliant little episode the Green Isle had it all to herself.

It will ever be one of the pleasantest memories of my life, that the good fortune was mine to call the attention of Sir Evelyn Wood to Bill Beresford’s conduct on this occasion. By next mail his recommendation for the Victoria Cross went home to England; and when he and I reached Plymouth Sound at the close of our voyage, the Prince of Wales, who was then in the Sound with Lord Charles Beresford, was the first to send aboard the _Dublin Castle_ the news that Her Majesty had been pleased to honour the recommendation. Lord William was commanded to Windsor to receive the reward “for Valour” from the hands of his Sovereign. But there is something more to be told. Honest as valiant, he had already declared that he could not in honour receive any recognition of the service it had been his good fortune to perform, unless that recognition were shared in by Sergeant O’Toole, who he persisted in maintaining deserved infinitely greater credit than any that might attach to him. Queen Victoria can appreciate not less than soldierly valour, soldierly honesty, generosity, and modesty; and so it came about that the next _Gazette_ after Lord William Beresford’s visit to Windsor contained the announcement that the proudest reward a soldier of our Empire can aspire to had been conferred on Sergeant Edmund O’Toole, of Baker’s Horse.

LA BELLE HÉLÈNE OF ALEXINATZ

A SKETCH OF THE SERVIAN WAR-TIME

I

It has been the fashion among soldiers to sneer at the fighting in the Turco-Servian campaign of 1876. I am ready to own that the strategy was a little mixed, and that the tactics were of the most rough-and-ready kind; but if ever a military writer cares to analyse its events crowded into the time between the beginning of July and the end of October, he will not fail to recognise that it was no bad work for the raw militia of a principality with a gross population of barely a million and a half, to make a stubborn stand against the forces of such an empire as Turkey, even in that empire’s decadence. No State could have had a more vulnerable frontier line. From the confluence of the Drina with the Save on the west, round her border to the Danube at Widdin, Servia on three sides was, so to speak, embedded in Turkish territory. The fierce Bosnians threatened her on the west; Albania marched with her on the south; on her east loomed Abdul Kerim Pasha from his base at Nisch, and Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, was a standing menace on the Widdin side of the Timok river. Struck at on four different points, Servia was, nevertheless, able to hold her foes at bay till that October afternoon when, determining for once to lay aside Fabian tactics, Abdul Kerim’s Turks pushed home their attack on the lines of Djunis, and turned the fire of the captured batteries on Tchernaieff’s camp at Deligrad. It should be remembered that Servia began the contest with a single brigade of regular soldiers, which perished as a force in the earlier encounters; that she maintained the struggle with militia levies and untrained volunteers; that until the Russian volunteers came to her aid, she had not a dozen officers who had any save the most rudimentary knowledge of the profession of arms; and that the sum total of her public revenue from all sources scarcely exceeded half a million sterling.

II

From the point of view of the war correspondent, the campaign, at least on the Servian side, fairly bristled with adventure and with opportunities for enterprise. There were few days on which a man, keen for that species of pleasure, could not, somehow or other, find a fight in which to enjoy himself. If he stood well with the military authorities--and the easiest way to do this was to manifest a serene indifference to the possible consequences of hostile fire--he was impeded by no restrictions in regard to his outgoings and incomings. He would be told of an impending fight in time to be present at it; and, fighting or no fighting, he was always welcome to what fare might be the portion of a staff that certainly did not hanker after luxuries. If he were content to rough it cheerily, and was always ready to “show a good front” with the first line of an attack, and the rear of a retreat (which latter was occasionally extremely hurried), he was treated _en bon camarade_ by every one, from the general to the subaltern. When Tchernaieff himself was eating that curious composition known as _paprikash_, and drinking the dreadful plum brandy which its makers call _zlibovitz_, the correspondent could live without beef-steaks, nor count it a grievance that there was no champagne to be had.

The easiest way into Servia for an invading force was down the valley of the Morava, a fine river, which, flowing close to the Turkish camp at Nisch, entered the principality a few miles south-east of the town of Alexinatz. Athwart its valley, some seventeen miles lower down than Alexinatz, stretched the lines of the entrenched camp at Deligrad, where, according to the original Servian plan, the great stand against the invading Turk was to be made. But as that person manifested little activity, and in fact, so far from invading, himself submitted to be invaded, time had served to devise and execute an advanced defensive line in front of Alexinatz. The position had the radical fault that it could be turned with ease, when there would ensue the danger that its defenders might be cut off from a retreat on Deligrad; but it had natural features of great strength against an enemy who might prefer a direct assault to a turning movement. South and east a great upland formed a continuous curtain to the quaint little town. Round the western bluff of this height flowed the gentle Morava, on the other side of which stretched a wide fertile valley, partly wooded, partly cultivated. It was this valley, prolonged as it was both to the north and south, that constituted the weakness of the Alexinatz position; nor was the hasty line of entrenchments drawn athwart it, or the earth-work covering the bridge of boats across the Morava, any adequate counterbalance to this weakness. As for the upland curtain, by the beginning of August that naturally strong position had been artificially strengthened by a continuous defensive line, studded by near a score of redoubts armed with twenty-four and twelve-pounders, emplacements intervening for the guns of the field artillery batteries. General Tchernaieff was himself in command, with some 13,000 Servian militia of the first levy, and a considerable number of Russian volunteers, both officers and men.

III

The days in Alexinatz were by no means dull. None of its population had as yet fled; and for the stranger who had acquired some Servian, there was even a little society. There were two hotels in the place--the “Crown,” where most of us correspondents lived, because the people there did not insist on more than two persons occupying the same bedroom; and the “King of Greece,” whither we used to betake ourselves to drink our coffee, since the _fille de comptoir_ was a pretty Servian girl, whom the _Figaro_ correspondent had christened “La Belle Hélène.” Poor Hélène! before the armistice she had died of typhus fever in that rottenest of holes, Paratchin; but in her heyday at Alexinatz she was an extremely cheery young person, full of not wholly artless coquetry, and prone to stimulate rancorous jealousies among the idle suppliants for her smiles.

Villiers and myself took but few opportunities to bask in Hélène’s smiles. One while we were away on the foreposts, actually inside the Turkish territory, and where from the hill-top on which, with a handful of reckless desperadoes like himself, Captain Protopopoff, a Russian soldier of fortune whom I had already known in the Carlist war, kept watch and ward, we could see the spires of Nisch itself, with the Turkish camps lying under the Sutar Planina and the fort-crowned Mount Goritza. Then we were off, through Fort Banja and Kjusevatz--where we found the gallant Horvatovitz in the very thick of a brisk fight with the Turks--to Saitschar on the eastern frontier, just in time to be driven out of that place along with Colonel Leschanin and its Servian defenders at the hands of Osman Pasha, abandoning momentarily that curious inactivity of his on the green heights on the other side of the Timok. It was a horrible nightmare, that night march from out the evacuated Saitschar. Cannon roaring, flames lighting up the valley, gusts of thick smoke driven athwart the hill faces, the heaven’s lightning flashing in competition with the lightning of man; a narrow steep road crammed with fugitives fleeing from the wrath behind them; women clamouring wildly that the Turk was close behind them; children shrieking or sobbing; animals--oxen, sheep, goats, swine, and poultry--huddled in an inextricable entanglement in the road of retreat. Two months later, when the Servians made an unsuccessful attempt to retake Saitschar from Osman Pasha, Villiers and I were to listen again to the angry shriek of his shells, and the cruel bicker of his musketry fire.

IV

It was not till Saturday, August 19, that Alexinatz heard that species of music. On that day a Turkish column dashed into the Morava valley and fell upon the Servian advance-positions. There was some hard fighting, but the Servians for that day at least held their own, and prevented the Turks from getting farther forward than the village of Supovatz. But on the Sunday, the latter, reinforced from Nisch, renewed the offensive in force and with vigour. The Servians, who had also been reinforced, made a sturdy fight of it out in front of Tessica. From that village, where I had spent the night, I had early sent word back to the surgeons of the St. Thomas’s Hospital ambulance, who had pushed up to the front at Alexinatz, that they would find plenty of employment about Tessica; and about noon had ridden back to meet them. Near the bridge-head I encountered them, Mackellar in command, with Sandwith, Hare, and poor Attwood in the waggon with him; and, turning, went forward with them to what seemed a suitable spot for a _Verband-platz_, at a cross-road where the wounded had already gathered pretty numerously. As they tumbled out, pulled off their tunics, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work, I took the precaution to turn their waggon round, with the horses’ heads in the direction of Alexinatz, since the road was too narrow for quick and easy turning, if anything should occur to crowd it. But it was more from routine than from any serious apprehension that I did this; for the Servians seemed prospering fairly well in the long, hot struggle with their Turkish assailants.

After a rapid scurry to the front, I had returned to the _Verband-platz_, and was giving assistance there, when all at once I chanced to look up. I had become engrossed with the dressing business, and had been neglecting to watch the fighting. To my amazement, I could see no Servians out to the front. There were soldiers there, but they were blue-jacketed Turks, darting forward and firing at intervals. A straggling fire was discernible behind us, so that, in fact, we were between two fires. The Servians had melted away all of a sudden, and were in sudden, panic-stricken retreat. Our attention awakened, we could hear the scurry of the fugitives along the road flanking the field in which we were at work. Not a moment was to be lost, for already we could hear the shouts of the Turks; the wounded, unable to walk, were bundled into the waggon, from which the driver had fled without warning us; the surgeons scrambled up somehow; and I, hitching my saddle horse behind, took the reins, because I knew the roads and also how to drive. Our waggon was the rear-guard of all the force that had been holding the Tessica front. The Turks made a dash to intercept us; but the little horses could gallop, and it was a time to let them out. Presently we overtook the wreck of the stampede, and bored our way into the chaos. Provision waggons, cannon, tumbrils, and waggon-loads of wounded men were hurrying in pell-mell confusion among galloping cavalry-men and running foot-soldiers. The rout lasted till within two miles of the bridge-head, and there was a time when I thought the Turks would enter Alexinatz with the Servian fugitives. But a fresh front had quickly formed by troops rapidly drawn from out the Alexinatz defensive line; the officers exerted themselves vigorously to arrest the stampede, and the Turks did not seem to care to profit by their good fortune.

V

The isolated combat of this Sabbath was but the prelude to four days’ as stubborn fighting as I have ever witnessed. The Turks seemed to have made up their minds to carry Alexinatz at any cost; but apparently failed to recognise at how little cost the position might be made untenable for the Servians by a wide turning movement down the valley on the left bank of the Morava. They had hardened their hearts for the desperate effort of winning by sheer direct fighting a position of extraordinary strength when so assailed. The Monday opened with a fierce cannonade from the Turkish batteries directed against the Servian troops holding the broken _terrain_ in front of the entrenched position, and this artillery preparation was followed in the afternoon by a series of furious infantry attacks. With flaming volleys the Turks swept forwards over the hedges and through the copses, with a confident steadfastness that boded ill for the militiamen waiting waveringly to confront them. As the Turks came on, I watched the Servian line give a kind of shudder; then it broke, the men huddling together into groups, as if they had thought of forming rallying squares, firing the while wildly. They rallied again on the edge of a wood, but the Turkish cannon had followed fast in the track of the Turkish fighting line, and opened fire on the Servians just in the act of attempted re-formation. As they broke and ran, courting the cover of the woods, the Turks followed them up steadily, slowly, inexorably! By nightfall the Turkish skirmishers were holding the wooded bottom of the valley, out of which rose the long bare slope that constituted a natural glacis to the line of Servian entrenchments drawn across the crest of the upland-curtain which covered the town of Alexinatz. That entrenched line carried, the Bashi-Bazouks would be in the streets of Alexinatz half an hour later.

There was no lull in the fighting on the following day, although the Turks held their hand for the time from the effort to storm the entrenched position. They fought their way on the left bank of the Morava, closer in towards the bridge-head, and got so forward with their artillery as to be able to throw shells into the town itself. On the Alexinatz side of the river they concerned themselves with driving in the Servians from their advanced positions round towards the south-eastern flank of the entrenched face, fighting hard for every step of ground which they were able to gain.

Of the detached incidents of this day I have no record. I wrote as I rode, making short notes as events occurred, and tearing the leaves out of my note-book and sending them into the town for despatch by the post to my colleague at Belgrade, who telegraphed from the Austrian side at Semlin everything that reached him from the front. But no post went out that night, nor would it have carried my leaflets if it had, since the officer who undertook to deliver my letter at the post-office was killed by a shell when crossing an exposed point in his way into the town. My memory of the day is a blurred confusion of continual musketry fire, of short stands ever to lapse into sullen retirements, of wounded men who had to be abandoned to the cruel fate that awaited them from the ruthless Turks, of burning thirst, of blistering heat, of that sense of depression which reverses always give to the spectator, alien though he may be. Villiers, worn with fatigue and exposure, had gone back into the town with the English surgeons, who, with the gallant and energetic Baron Mundy for their coadjutor, had been toiling all day long in a hollow until the Turkish shells began to fall thick and fast among the wounded whose condition they were striving to ameliorate.

VI

After nightfall I followed them; but not to eat or to rest. For nobody in Alexanitz that night was there either food or rest. Poor little Hélène was sobbing in a corner over a young Servian sergeant who had been brought in sore wounded, and who, she told us with streaming eyes, was her sweetheart. The townsfolk, spite that shells were dropping in their streets and firing their houses, were loth to quit the place to which were linked all their associations and all their interests. The night was one long horror: cannon roaring through the fire-flecked darkness, shells whistling through the air and crashing into the houses, the rumbling of the waggons carrying in the wounded, the groaning of the poor creatures torn by bullet or shattered by shell. We spent the whole of it in the hospital, for the claims of common humanity had converted Villiers and myself into nurses, and in company with a most resolute, tender, and composed Russian lady, we did our best to help the surgeons. It was a dread experience, even to one who had seen much war.

The hospital and its vicinity were littered with broken and mangled human beings. Through the long terrible night, Baron Mundy, Mr. Mackellar, and their young comrades toiled on unremittingly, amputating, extracting, probing, bandaging. No sooner was a batch of wounded attended to and cases affording a chance of life disposed of, than fresh cargoes were in waiting, now from the other side of the river, now from the other scene of action in front of the entrenchments on the heights. Several hundreds of cases were hurriedly seen to during the night by the English ambulance surgeons alone; but the proportion of wounded brought in was but small compared with the numbers of poor wretches left to the ruthlessness of the Turks during the sudden retreats of the Servian soldiery. The Russian ambulance was doing its work of humanity as assiduously as were our own countrymen, and a few Servian surgeons were behaving with courage and assiduity, in marked contrast to too many who were good for nothing in any sense. Although daylight was certain to bring an exacerbation of the long struggle, there was surely no human being in Alexinatz that night who was not glad when the young rays of the morning sun came glinting through the lurid pall of smoke that overhung the town.

To this fearful night succeeded a bloody day. The Turks had been massing all night behind cover, around the fringes of the bare slopes in front of the entrenchment line, and, after a preliminary artillery duel, their gallant infantry darted forward to attempt the storm of their strong position. It was a bold undertaking, fought out with stubborn valour, for the effort was renewed over and over again.

There was little variety in the method of the Turkish assaults. Let a sketch of one which I find in my note-book serve for a description of them all. The short jotting was made while I watched. “The Turks, in loose order, jump out of the lateral hollow and come on at the double, under cover of a shower of shells. The Servian guns open with shrapnel, and a Gatling mitrailleuse rains bullets on the charging Turks. At five hundred yards the Servian infantry behind the breastworks open fire. The Turk reply, and still keep pressing forward, falling fast as they come. They make a rush, headed by a gallant leader. A hundred yards more, and the forwardest of them are on the lip of the ditch. The leader rolls into it, shot, and his voice rings no more above the din of the strife. His followers waver, stagger, then turn and run. The assault has been repulsed.”

These efforts lasted till sundown, when the slopes leading up to the entrenched line were strewn with Turkish dead. In the early evening, Tchernaieff, rightly believing that the Turks were discouraged, took the offensive, and attacked them on both banks of the Morava. There was desperate fighting all night; but when morning dawned it was apparent that the Turks were slowly and sullenly falling back from every point. Tchernaieff, striking them hard as they went, sent them “reeling up the valley” till they had recrossed their own frontier. No longer for a time did the people of Alexinatz hear the cannon thunder, or start at the near rattle of the musketry fire.

VII

The same afternoon I started for Belgrade, eager to regain communications with my newspaper. Political complications had arisen there, the interest of which detained me in the Servian capital--with the less reluctance that all seemed quiet for the time in the upper Morava valley. Villiers I had left in Alexinatz, with the tryst that I was to rejoin him there as soon as circumstances would permit; and I was sure that were there signs of trouble in the air, I should promptly hear from him by telegraph. At length I was free to quit Belgrade, and started on my return journey to Alexinatz early in the morning of Friday, Sept. 2, travelling right through. As I was nearing Tchupria in the small hours of the following morning, a carriage dashed past me, travelling at great speed. Tchupria I found, although it was three o’clock, already awake and agitated. On every lip were the words, “Alexinatz has fallen!” “How have you heard?” I asked of the landlady of the inn. “It was told us by the English lords who drove through about half an hour ago. They were almost the last to escape from the place!”

Here was news indeed! Who were the English lords? What had happened to Villiers? How had it fared with our courageous comrades, the English surgeons? I pressed on, to the chorus of “Alexinatz is fallen,” through Paratschin, and on to Raschan, a village only a few miles short of Deligrad. As I drew rein at Raschan, there caught my eye the figure of a man slumbering on the broad shelf outside the window of a butcher’s shop. It was Mackellar. As he rubbed his eye, he told me the news in scraps. On the previous day the Turks had come sweeping into the Morava valley, on the opposite bank from Alexinatz, had driven the Servians in on their bridge-head, and had actually touched the river between Alexinatz and Deligrad. He and his mates had been in the field all day, had got cut off from Alexinatz, and had swum the river and got to Raschan here somehow, after an uncommonly unpleasant night. Mackellar knew nothing as to the fate of Alexinatz, but feared that at the best it was surrounded. On an adjoining slab, Mr. (now Sir William) MacCormac was reposing, and in a house close by were the other surgeons. Mr. MacCormac could tell more of Alexinatz than Mackellar had been able to do. He had been there with Colonel Loyd-Lindsay in the interests of the British Red Cross Society, and had been in the field among the wounded until nightfall. After dark the Turkish musketry fire had drawn closer and closer in on the place; the news spread that the bridge had been carried, and then there came the clamour that the Turks were actually fighting their way into the town. It had seemed wise to get away from the place when as yet there was the possibility of leaving it; and Colonel Lindsay and he had therefore started with a couple of companions. Colonel Lindsay had pressed on to Belgrade--it was his carriage I had passed near Tchupria: he (Mr. MacCormac) had halted in Raschan to ascertain the fate of the other surgeons, and in the hope that there might be opportunities for him to be of service in organising assistance to the wounded.

All this was interesting enough; but there were two matters as to which I could learn nothing specifically--what had befallen Alexinatz, and how Villiers and my servant were faring in all this turmoil and confusion. Villiers had been left by MacCormac finishing his dinner in the hotel; Colonel Lindsay had offered to take him out, but he had declined the offer somewhat curtly, and gone on with his dinner. When I heard this, my anxiety for the young man was sensibly alleviated. I knew Villiers to be cool without being rash, and I drew the inference that he had not regarded the plight of Alexinatz as quite so desperate as it had appeared to the “English lords.” So I pursued my way to Deligrad, where I found the troops holding that position, on the alert, but in no state of unwonted excitement. And on the roadside at Deligrad I found my servant guarding a waggon which contained the collective baggage of Villiers, the surgeons, and myself. Andreas had been sent out of Alexinatz by Villiers about midnight with the baggage, as a precautionary measure; when Andreas had left Villiers, that composed young man was going to bed. Up till then Alexinatz had not fallen into the hands of the Turks. The fighting had died out; but Tchernaieff had given orders that all the civilian inhabitants were to evacuate the place at daylight.

Andreas made me some coffee--it was still early morning--and then I started forward on the Alexinatz road. Presently I met the long column of civilian inhabitants, who had quitted the place by the General’s order. It was at once a mournful and a laughable procession. Here a weeping woman, with two children on her back, was trying to drive a little flock of miscellaneous live stock--goats, a cow, three pigs, and about a dozen geese; there a man was wheeling his bed-ridden wife in a wheelbarrow.

A long convoy of piled-up waggons crawled along the dusty road. From the apex of one of these poor “Belle Hélène” hailed me sadly; her sergeant was dead, and she had no future worth caring for. The current of Alexinatz emigration lasted for several miles; and close on its rear came tramping a long column of Servian soldiers, at the head of which rode General Tchernaieff and his staff. Neither scare nor hurry was apparent; no flankers lined the peaceful-seeming march; no roar of cannon or rattle of musketry broke the monotone of the tramp of feet and hum of voices. What did it all mean? Well, one problem was solved; there was Villiers, with a cigarette between his lips, as he strode along on foot chatting with Tchernaieff’s aide-de-camp. The sententious young man seemed rather bewildered by the eager warmth of my greeting. Why this quite uncalled-for emotion? I had made the tryst with him that we should rendezvous in Alexinatz. Well, for his part, he had been loth to break troth, and had only come away when he saw no prospect of procuring food. No single civilian was left in all Alexinatz; you could not even buy a piece of bread; and he respectfully submitted that, with all imaginable anxiety to keep faith, he could not see his way to living on air.

As he talked, Tchernaieff pulled on one side and informed me of the military situation. The Turks had meddled no more with Alexinatz since their previous discomfiture. Their new scheme was to mask it, and press past it northward down the left bank of the Morava. This had involved driving in what force he had been maintaining in the valley on the left bank; and it was their doing of this that had brought about the battle of the previous day. It was necessary for him, with part of the troops that had been holding Alexinatz, to retire on Deligrad, there and thereabouts to oppose the new line of the Turkish advance; but he had left to garrison the Alexinatz lines General Popovitz with 5000 men. Alexinatz had not fallen, nor although its situation was obviously precarious--hence the evacuation of the civilian population he had thought himself bound to enforce--was there any prospect of its immediate abandonment.

VIII

And so the General rode on. It seemed to me that the best way to give evidence that the story of the fall of Alexinatz was untrue was to go there, and despatch telegrams from the place, of whose fall assured tidings had been disseminated far and wide. So Villiers and I took the road by which he had travelled, and plodded our way into empty Alexinatz. It presented an aspect of strange weird loneliness. Not even the cats had been left behind. Popovitz was living in a shed away at the bridge-head, and his soldiers were disposed along the line of the entrenched position in the reverse slope of the upland curtain. No creature was in all that place, whose normal population was close on 10,000 souls. All the doors had been left open. We strolled into the “Crown,” to find the kitchen hearth cold, and what had been our bedroom stripped stark of furniture. Then we went down to the “Greek King,” and gazed on the deserted counter at which “La Belle Hélène” had been wont to preside. On a trestle in a corner of the hospital, where the surgeons had been slaving a fortnight previously, there lay a dead man, her sweetheart. He had died, no doubt, during the night in the midst of the bustle of evacuation, and the heedless Servian orderlies had not troubled to see to the poor fellow’s interment. We were idle, we two, so we carried him out into the garden, and hid him in a shallow grave under the blossoming standard roses. This done, we tramped along the silent streets out to where, at the bridge-head, honest Popovitz had his rough quarters. As we went, Villiers told me the story of the previous day.

The fighting had been very hard, and there had been a time when he had believed the Turks were bent on crossing the Morava, and taking the place in reverse, on the side where it was unprotected. But even had they persevered in this intention, he had realised that there would still remain open the line of retreat out to the east in the direction of Banja, and that it would be quite time for him to go when he saw the troops commencing their evacuation. As the evening drew in, it had been clear to him that the Turks were gaining no ground. He had previously listened to a good deal of heavy firing around Alexinatz, and had learnt to form an estimate of its distance, so when the clamour arose that the bridge had been taken, and when scared breathless men--who ought to have kept their heads better--had panted out that the Turks were “at the bottom of the street,” he had gone out and listened, and had made up his mind that the firing was as yet a good two miles away at the least. And then he had come in and gone on with his dinner, as became a sensible man, and when he had been pressed to come away with the departing people of his nationality, had been unable to recognise the urgent necessity of the hurried retreat.

Popovitz was very civil, and allowed me to despatch a telegram; but could not ask us to luncheon, for the very good reason that he had no luncheon for himself. So we left him, and returned into the silent town. Up at the head of the main street there was, we bethought ourselves, a pretty cottage inhabited by an old Tâtar, who, in the days when the quickest route between Western Europe and Constantinople was through Belgrade, Alexinatz, Nisch, Sophia, and Adrianople, used to accompany the King’s messengers, who had to ride without a halt, save to change from one horse to another, that long rough journey. He was an interesting man, this old Tâtar, with his tales in a broken composite of many languages, of the long winter gallops through the snow-wreaths with Heneage or Johnson, when the wolves would chase the emissary of Britannic majesty, and the Albanian robbers would strive to make prize of him. We had been wont to sit with him in his garden-bower, and listen to his polyglot yarns of the old rough days when he, now bent and shrivelled, thought nothing of riding 800 miles at a stretch. We bethought ourselves now of the old fellow’s cottage, as likely to furnish the most comfortable quarters; and since there was more of the Turk than the Serv in the old Tâtar, it was possible that he might not have cared to clear out with the other inhabitants. We found him at home, sitting quietly in his own leafy porch under the great hanging bunches of grapes; he was too old, he said, to go travelling now, and had resolved to stay and take his chance. Stay he did later, when Popovitz went and left Alexinatz to him and the Turks; and badly enough did he fare at the hands of the latter. The Bashi-Bazouks promptly killed the poor old fellow.

Well, he was as kind to us as his means permitted of. He had neither meat nor wine, but he made us coffee, and gave us bread and grapes, and he gave us sleeping-quarters as well; but when I remember the insect-horrors of that night, I shudder still. Next morning, recognising that empty Alexinatz was extremely stupid, and that probably there would be some fighting soon away in the Krusevatz direction, we paid our farewell respects to Popovitz, took leave of the friendly old Tâtar--the “last man” of Alexinatz, and started back to Deligrad on as hot a walk as ever I remember. We had to make a detour to avoid a handful of Circassians who had crossed the Morava on a foray, and found great amusement at a wayside tavern in the boasting of some Servian militia, who claimed that they had done doughty battle with the Tcherkesses, and driven them back across the river. When I ventured to point out that the barrels of their pieces were clean, they lost their tempers, and threatened to shoot us--a menace which we could afford to smile at, since the old muskets had lost their locks. We never went back to Alexinatz again, but stout Popovitz held the place till the Servian strength was shattered on the heights of Djunis in the end of October; and he then evacuated it only by order of Tchernaieff. Had he been left there one day more, it would have remained with the Servians under the terms of the armistice; but before that came into effect the Turks had occupied Alexinatz, and it was Fazli Pasha’s headquarters during the following winter. When the peace was signed, and its people came back to what had been their homes, they found the place a wreck. The Turks had made firewood of everything that would burn.

AN OUTPOST ADVENTURE

The war correspondent who accompanied the Russian Army which crossed the Danube in the summer of 1877, and who had the good fortune to be a welcome person, found his path of duty made exceedingly easy for him. And whether he was a welcome person or not depended almost entirely on himself. His newspaper might be held in obloquy, but the authorities ignored the hostility of the paper with something that closely resembled magnanimity, and the correspondent was not held responsible for the tone of his journal, but only for the matter in it which he himself contributed. It is rather a mild way of putting it to say that the _Standard_, for instance, was not friendly to Russia throughout the period in question; but Mr. Boyle, its representative, was quite frankly accepted, and has testified to the courtesy and comradeship of the Russian officers. He had to go, and everybody ought to rejoice that this fate befell him, because it was the occasion of his brilliant and amusing book, _The Diary of an Expelled Correspondent_; the _teterrima causa_ assigned was a passage in one of his letters. The _Daily Telegraph_ could not have struck the reader as being more bitter against the Russians than was its contemporary of Shoe Lane; but the gentleman designated to represent it when he presented himself at Kischeneff was refused his legitimation. This, however, was for reasons purely personal to the candidate, against whom there was some ill-will in the Russian headquarters, and not, as I understood, because of the tone of the journal by which he was accredited.