Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/574

 Those Parisian shadows suggest to me a strange shadow pantomime I once saw in Spain, during the Carlist campaign, at an engagement at Behobie. The fighting began at about five in the morning in a dense white fog, when the Carlists made a desperate effort to take that small town from an inferior but unflinching force. The effect was, on approaching the scene, most ludicrous. In the first place, one was strangely impressed by mingled sounds as of the barking of dogs and the quacking of ducks, which turned out to be only terms of derision which each side was hurling at the other. Then, on coming closer still, the shadow pantomime of which I have spoken presented itself, just for all the world like mimic war on a white sheet, till, the veil of fog lifting, fighting—literally to the knife—presented itself in all its terrible reality. Under cover of that fog the Carlist hordes had come down from their Pyrenean retreats without the aid of those arranged ruses which the armies of all nations have so often to fall back upon. Amongst these is the common one, when wind and locality serve, of attacking under cover of the smoke of burning forests or furze bushes. One ruse during the siege of Plevna has always struck me in this connection as having been cleverly conceived.

The Turks, on the occasion of a sortie, secured as many uniforms of dead Russians as was possible. These they promptly put on, and, covering their main body, advanced backwards, as if retreating in good order on a strong Russian position. The Turkish officer in command—understanding the Russian tongue—gave the order to "Retire." Seeing and hearing this, the Rus- sians, supposing it to be an unexpected retreat of their own men, made no defence, till, when too late, they discovered them to be Moslems in Muscovite garb, who, after a most sanguinary fight, succeeded in occupying the vantage point they had gained.

The eccentricities of bullets, too, are not a little interesting. There was a case in Asia Minor of a bullet which made six distinct holes of entry and exit in a man's body, without materially injuring him, before it passed away into the open. It may be explained that the man was in a kneeling position and firing at the time he was struck. This erratic ball passed first through the biceps of his right arm, between his ribs, and again through the triceps of his left arm. In Spain, also, I remember an instance in which a bullet passed through an officer's chacot, the draught of which stunned him; he was found quite insensible, though uninjured, while that chacot had been drilled with the ball which had thus prostrated him. On two occasions I have myself had similar and most providential escapes—once at a place known as La Puncha, on the banks of the Bidassoa, where, when sketching for The Illustrated London News, I was brought suddenly to the ground by a Carlist bullet, with one leg completely shattered, but then, you see, it was the leg of the camp stool on which I was seated; the other was when Conigsby, The Times' correspondent, and myself were going in a drosky in the direction of Zimnitza, to join the Russians at Plevna.

Our route lay for some considerable distance along an exposed road by the side of the Danube, and it was then that the Turkish batteries on the opposite shore opened a deliberate fire on us with such telling effect that the back of our conveyance was considerably splintered, and a portmanteau against which I was leaning completely smashed, its contents being hardly recognisable. I am reminded, while on this subject, of how the correspondent to the Macon journal was once in imminent peril of being blown to atoms, a circumstance to which I was an eye-witness.

He was about to return through a huge wooden gate into a besieged Spanish town. During his absence of only about ten minutes, however, a large mortar had been put in position behind it, and a large roughly sawn aperture made. Just at the very moment of his return, it was fired, the draught sending him flying for some considerable distance!

Though within a hair's breadth of death, he was happily only bruised, while thus unwittingly seeking "the bubble reputation even at the cannon's mouth." Nor are the eccentricities of shot and shell more curious than those of cold steel, the most remarkable instance which I remember being that of a Russian and a Turk, who, meeting, fought to the death with fixed bayonets in a wood in Anatolia. The fatal thrusts. must have been simultaneous, the strange fact being that both stood, with their legs much apart, each with his bayonet embedded deeply in his adversary's breast, for several days, and were to be seen, still erect, in the attitude of their last terrible death-struggle.