WITHIN PLEVNA.

Kumara Times, Issue 407, 15 January 1878, Page 2

WITHIN PLEVNA.

[From the “ London Times,”] SoFiAj October 22. I have just returned from Plevna along the saddest and .most forlorn route which it has ever, been my lot to travel. It was essential that the expedition which carried food ' and ammunition to Osman Pasha’s troops should move with all possible speed. The raiu whk-h accompanied it for the last live or eix days of the march amverted the country into a vast swamp, and made the roads*almost' impassable. The cold during the night was severs,” and the.niisenes ofti^ye^eye|^tc^t^psb' who were well provided for it, were very considerable. The Bulgarian, arab&jeea, who ware urged bn night and ‘ day towards the beleaguered town, were supplied with no rations.•’ Such food as they had tfyey o wed tp. their own •ingenuity and 'dishonesty. When ingenuity filled dr dishonesty was detected, the supplier broke down,and men died of famine l»y the way. Day pftef day, and night after night tjie miserable procession toiledWloug, throughmui and cold and’rain, until at every halting p]pce the bullocks die,d of exhaustion by

hundreds. These halting places were far apart, and the halts were brief. The worn-out beasts, released for a little while* from the collar, strayed into thj» swampy fields, and lay down there in huddled groups and died. The whole road looked like an extended slaughterhouse ; for the Bulgarians always found time to .skin the dead beasts, and to open the bodies for the sake of the entrails. It is not easy for imagination to do justice to the details of the march —a leaden sky, a monotonous and heavy rain, a flat and dreary country wrapped in mist, a road like the bed of a dirty river, and on the miserable banks of it the bodies of unburied men, and the stripped carcases of innumerable beasts. As we neared the close of our journey we found evidences of engagement with the enemy. Scattered at intervals along the roadside were a score or two of dead Turkish, soldiers—unsightly objects like the rest. It was natural that Plevna itself should be the scene of the greatest number of deaths of men and beasts from the dismal procession of Bulgarian arabas. Neither ■men nor beasts were buried. They lay about the environs of the town just as they stiffened into death. The party to which I had attached myself came into Plevna in rear of the first and larger detachment of arabas. Eis# we stopped while Dr. M'Kellar looked at the body of a Bulgarian driver, whose throat was clean cut from ear to ear, and who lay there now face upward in the dreary rain. Next we Captain Morisot pointed of about lours' distance from; the town. We j passed many otbfer bodies, but found j no others on which our casual and hurried examination.could detect any trace j of violence. Outside, the town, in a -somewhat sheltered' nook southward of the bridge, a vast crowd of arabas w«b huddled together. The drivers lad lighted fires among them, anii the buffaloes and bullocks were straying in the swamp on the other side of the way ; . This was their final halting place, and when we camg back again six dfcys later, we found the "traces of. it in • two naked Bulgarian bodies and more than a hundred carcases of beasts. It is. perhaps, too wild ■a fancy; but if any one of those forlorn arabajees could set the story of that 'dark march on record, it would make such a chapter as no romancist, of war has yet written or is likely to fancy for himself.

The first day of my residence in Pleyna was spent, in an inspection of the hospitals. Our. party placed itself under the guidance of Dr. Ryan, a young English surgeon in the Turkish service, and set out for the chief building in which the wounded were bestowed. "When we reached the main hospital we encountered a sceue of horror which went quite unspeakably beyond all our previous experiences. I am authorised by the gentleman I accompanied to say that it is quite beyond the power of language to exaggerate their bphron of the deplorable and hideous condition of the wounded. If I'could present y«u with an adequate pictnreof this dreadful place, I should produce a record which would dwarf Defoe's description of the laear houses of the plague. But to attempt such a picture would be to shock decenoy by every Una I venture to believe the horrors of this home of filth and agony unique and singular. The chambers were large and lofty,' and there were reasonable facilities 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 the very stairs, and men with fractures forty days old lay untended and helpless, side by side -jvith cases of raving fever and cpninent small-pox. If the reader will pain himself by thinking into what foul abandonment of nastiness one w-onnded man might fall if left absolutely unattended for 9 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 disejase.