THE HORRORS OF PLEVNA.

1 T seems to be reserved for the Turks, in their death-flurry, to

put a climax on the horrors of war. Ancient warfare was, to doubt, very barbarous, but the physical sufferings which accompanied it were mitigated by one material fact. The labour of a wounded man was worth money, and it was, therefore, an object, if he were curable, to cure him and keep him alive. Men severely wounded by the Roman javelin or the Roman cutlass__ the short sword which won Rome her Empire—were, no doubt, killed either on the spot in the fury of the struggle, or by the camp-followers who flocked to the field to plunder ; but those lightly wounded were carefully tended, in order that they might be sold into a slavery which, horrible as it was, must have had compensations, or the Italian landlords could never have retained touch tribes of slaves bigger and braver than themselves, and of

the same colour, in easy, and for the most part, unbroken obedience. The risk of life during the battle was as great as at present, and the risk of life after it greater than in any campaign in which the Turk is not the enemy, but the risk of pro- tracted physical pain was comparatively small. All wounds were cuts or thrusts, and though surgery was not a scientific art, still fewer bones were broken, men were healthy, and whatever of treatment the age understood was bestowed upon the wounded whom it was intended to preserve. There was no good surgery, but there was good tending. Modern warfare is also barbarous from the extreme severity of the wounds inflicted, the fragments of shell and conical bullets breaking bones, tearing out flesh, and making wounds which tax the skill of the highest surgeons even to think of remedy. But still all that can be done for the wounded is done ; amputation, though a terrible remedy, shortens or annuls suffering ; and the system of pensions prevents the

starvation to which the ancient soldier, if wounded and beaten—

for if victorious he got plunder or land—must often have been condemned. The modern Turkish system of warfare unites, however, all the horrors of the ancient and of the modern systems of war. kit. Forbes, who is not unfriendly to them, but regards them, as hunters regard wild beasts, as beings from whom nothing can be expected, emphatically asserts that they habitually murder the wounded. He says he has seen them do it. It has long been noticed, in confirmation of Mr. Forbes's state- ment, that the Turks have no Russian prisoners, and it is more than suspected that they put them to death with circumstances

of revolting cruelty. A correspondent of the Times, whose letter is published on Wednesday, says :- " Nearly 400 wounded remained (near Tolis) on the ground close to the works. Then occurred one of those abominable scenes of horror which would be incredible, if it were not testified to by our own two young countrymen, Dm. Douglas and Yodel's, who stated voluntarily, when prisoners in the Russian camp, what they had seen with their own eyes. Not a single dead man was touched, but the hapless wounded who fell into the hands of these brutes, worse than savages, underwent the torture of having their ears and noses out off, of worse and nameless mutilation, and in one or two cases, of being fastened down and having fires lighted on their stomachs. I do not relate what I saw myself, because the bodies wore all buried before I arrived ; but I toll you that which was related to me and to your Special Correspondent by the frank young Englishmen who saw it, and who vowed that no consideration on earth should induce them to serve with the Turks again."

This is not done from any idea that prisoners might be dangerous or difficult to feed, for the Turks would have no scruple what-

ever in leaving them to starve. They do it oven to their own people. A correspondent who went into Plevna with a Turkish convoy, apparently as a doctor sent out by charitable people in England to attend the Turkish wounded, discovered that the Bul- garian cart-driveri—Turkish subjects, mind, and subjects whom, according to Mr. Forbes, the Turks treat with quite tender con- sideration, sparing their crops and cattle when they can—are not allowed any rations on the march, and have either to live by theft or to die of starvation. When they give way from hunger, they are lashed till they go on again, and when even torture wilrforco them to do no more, they are killed or left to starve. He says The Bulgarian arabajees [drivers of long springless carts], who were urged on night and day towards the beleaguered town, were

supplied with no rations. Such food as they had they owed to their own ingenuity and dishonesty. When ingenuity failed or dishonesty was detected, the supplies broke down, and men died of famine by the way We stopped while Dr. Mackellar looked at the body of a Bulgarian driver whose throat was clean cut from ear to ear, and who lay there now face upwards in the dreary rain, Next we stayed while Captain Morisot pointed out the evidences which surrounded the stark-naked body of another Bulgarian. Broken sticks lay near the body, and one stick lay across it, and the whole prostrate figure was thickly marked with bruises. We paused again to look at another stark-naked corpse, also that of a Bulgarian. This man had been stripped and stoned to death. The missiles lay thick lyabout him, and one stone rested where it fell, in the open and passive left hand. There was no easy possi- bility of mistake about the nationality to which these murdered men had belonged. Though they were stripped, and all signs of costume were carried away, they were to be identified at once by the long plaits of hair they wore,—a fashion utterly repulsive to the Turk, and never adopted by him Hassan Pasha was examining a number of Bulgarian prisoners who were charged with insubordination. The offence committed by these men was that of lying down in the mud, and professing their immediate intention to die there. This conduct was, of course, intolerable, and the Pasha ordered the men to be bastinadoed." Then the men's feet gangrene, and they die so, still to all appear- anco without rations. Why should they not? They are dis- contented subjects, and the Turkish Pashas do not treat them one whit worse than they treat their own best soldiers, the half-

million of men whose splendid bravery is, to Lord Beaconsfield's mind and the mind of English society, a proof that the Pashas, who value them less than their horses, deserve to rule for ever. The correspondent of the Times found in Plevna a scene of hor-

rors which he has hesitated, and, indeed, declined fully to de- scribe. We have, however, his own authority, and that of Drs.

Ryan, Mackellar, and Moore, all sent out, be it remembered, to Turks, and all, therefore, of Turkish sympathies, for what follows :—

" When we reached the main hospital, we encountered a scone of horror which went quite unspeakably beyond all our previous experi- ences. I am authorised by the gentleman I accompanied to say that it is quite beyond the power of language to exaggerate their opinion of the deplorable and hideous condition of the wounded. If I could present you with an adequate picture of this dreadful place, I should produce a record which would dwarf De Foe's description of the Lazar-houses of the Plague. But to attempt such a picture would bo to shook decency by every lino. I venture to believe the horrors of this home of filth and agony unique and singular. The chambers wore largo and lofty, and there were reasonable faeilitios for ventilation, but the odours which filled every one of them were sickening past all words. Wounded men in every stage of disease and filth and pain littered the floors. The stagnant miseries had overflowed into the Corridors and on to the very stairs, and men with fractures forty days old lay untended and helpless, side by side with cases of raving fever and confluent small-pox. If the reader will pain himself by thinking into what foul abandonment of nastiness one wounded man might fall if loft absolutely untended for a week, and will then multiply that imagination by a thousand, he may begin to conceive the state of things which so horrified men accustomed to the sights of war and the ravages of disease. There were scores of fractures there which had remained unset, and had united of their own accord in such distorted attitudes that in Dr. Moore's phrase, ' limbs were twisted like a ram's horn.' There were filth, and famine, and fever, and gangrene, and every con- ceivable horror of pain and sickness; and the men, of course, were dying literally like rotten sheep. Outside, in the hospital square, lay forty-three corpses, Death's harvest for the day. Those, I was told, re- presented the daily average for the building I have described, and a mailer one which stood next door. It was a piece of careless cruelty, and a part of the wicked stupidities of tho place, that these dead bodies should be stripped and laid out within sight of every sick or wounded man who was able to crawl into the square for exercise, or who was carried through it from the field to the hospital. The total tale of wounded reached 4,500. We visited other hospitals, and found them like the first, and the doctors when they left wore naturally quite full of schemes of work."

It was expected that when the new doctors arrived, order of some kind would be introduced into this hell, but Osman Pasha, "the Victorious," the General in command, with the ".A.siatic eyes " and " singularly thick lips," compressed till they are scarcely noticeable (vide description in the Standard, so friendly to Turks),

the hero whom English society delights to honour, refused to allow any treatment, and peremptorily ordered his own wounded to be at once carted away. In vain the doctors remonstrated, and showed that the order involved massacre—the Pasha was inexorable, and the wounded were forcibly removed :—" I was riding down the street when the first convoy of a thousand started from the town, and I trust it may never again be my fortune to witness such a miserable crowd as I saw there. The wretched soldiers stretched out their hands for pity and assistance as I rode by, and though I understand but little Turkish, the pitiful " Amen !" shrieked or groaned, and the appealing hands and writhing faces were more than eloquent. Osman Pasha will find his apologists and his judges. For myself, I have no business but to relate facts. I have related the truth, and nothing but the truth. To relate the whole truth was beyond my power." Of all the inci- dents in Napoleon's career, the opium which he is believed to have administered to his own wounded at Jaffa has left the deepest stain upon his fame. Yet it was administered at the request of the men themselves, who knew if they lived what tortures the Turks would inflict ; but what was his callousness to Osman's, who nevertheless finds in English society and English journals men to extenuate his acts, and sug- gest that he showed mercy to Turkey in his mercilessness to those who died in torture for the sake of his reputation. It was mercy to Turkey to expel the wounded. Was it mercy, then, to leave them forty days untended ? Is it mercy to Turkey, mercy by the judgment of the sternest soldiers that any civilised land can produce, to teach every Turk that when overmatched his only course is surrender, for that, if wounded, his own officers will abandon him to a slow death by torture ? The argument is as futile as it is inhuman, and so is the argumentfrom creed. No doubt the Turk is a fatalist. If he were not, the men would anticipate the just vengeance of Heaven on those who so maltreat them, and whose conduct is extenuated by the very Englishmen who are

never tired of extolling the patience and the virtue and the bravery of their victims;; but a belief in necessity does not prevent the Turkish officer from providing for the attendance on himself and his own comforts which is refused to the men dying in hos- pital of gangrene, foulness, and neglect. How any human being can read that narrative, fully confirmed in the Turkophile Standard, without a prayer that Providence may speedily bring the Turkish Empire to an end, we are utterly unable to con- ceive, or rather should be, did we not know by long ex- perience that in Englishmen there is some strange imperfection of sympathy,—that men who never in their lives ill-treated a dependant will defend slavery ; that men whom one hour of Turkish domination would drive mad will extenuate or affect to disbelieve its worst horrors ; that men devoted to unrepaid labour for the poor will rail at those who would limit vivisec- tion. It is well for the world that in Russia and Germany there are men who read of these things with minds not blinded by fancied " interests," and that slowly but surely the hour of the gigantic iniquity draws near.