A MEMORY OF PLEVNA.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLIII, Issue 2288, 11 March 1912, Page 2

A MEMORY OF PLEVNA.

THE CZAK ALEXANDER 11. After the disaster met with by Krudener and Shahofskoy in front of Plevna on the 30th of July, 1878, and Gourko's enforced retirement to the northern side of the BaL-&n6, the Imperial headquarters were moved westward to a village called Gorni Studen, about equidistant from Plevna, Sistova, and Tirnova. Biela had become poisonous by reason of its utter disregard of all sanita~y precautious, and the Emperor, Alexander 11., had been ailing from low fever, rheumatism and asthma, the last his chronic ailment. At Gorni Studen he abandoned tent-life, and only occasionally came to the common table in the mess marquee. A dismantled Turkish house was fitted up for him after a fashion, and his bedroom was a tiny (chamber, with mud walls and a mud floor. It was in the balcony of this house where I had an interview with him in August, when I had ridden in from the SkipIka with the unexpected good news that Radetski was holding his own stoutly in the St. Nicholas position among the Shipka rocks, against the j fierce assaults of a Mehemet Ali's j Turks. I had a difficulty in recognising him, so changed was he from the early days at Simnitza. He had shrunken visibly, he stooped, his head had gone down between his shoulders, and his voice was broken and tremulous. He was gaunt, worn, and haggard, his nervous system seemed quite shattered. There was a hunted expression in his eye, and he gasped for breath in the spasms of the asthma that afflicted him. I left him with the vivid apprehension that he was not to break the spell that was said to condemn every Romanoff to the grave before the age of sixty. As epilepsy is the domestic curs'? of the Hapsburgs, so hypochondria is the familj malady of the Romanoffs. Alexander was a prey to it in the Gorni Studen hovel. But it had not full sway over him, There was Pomething wonderfully pathetic in the eagerness with which he grasped at the expressed belief of an unprofessional neutral like myself, in the face of the apprehensions to the contrary of all about him, that Radetski would be able to make good the tenure of v his position on the top of the Shipka. The Czar was present in the field during the six days' struggle around Plevna in the September of the war. The sappers had constructed for him on a little eminence, out of the usual line of hostile fire, a sort of look-out place from which was visible a great sweep of the scene of action. Behind it was a marquee in which was a long table continually spread with food and wine, where the suite supported nature jovially while men were dying hard bj in their thousands. As for the Czar himself after the first two days he neither ate nor drank. Anxiety visibly devoured him. He could not be restrained from leaving the observatory and going around among the gunners. I watched him on the little balcony of the look-out place, late on the afternoon of the fifth day of the struggle —it was his fete-day, save the mark*! —as he stood there in the sullen autumn .weather, gazing out with haggard straining eyes at the efforts to storm the great Grivitza redoubt. Assault after assault had been delivered ; assault after assault had failed ; now the final desperate struggle was being made, the forlorn hope of the day. The Turkish Ore crushed down his Russians as they battled their way up the slope, slippery already with Roumanian blood ; the pale face on the balcony quivered and the tall fieure winced and cowered. As he stood there bearing his cross in solitary anguish, he was a spectacle of majestic misery that ! could never be forgotten. 1 After Plevna had fallen in December, the Emperor returned to St. Petersburg, there to be greeted with a reception the like of which for pure enthusiasm I have ever witnessed.— From " Barrackg, Bivouacs, and Bafc» ties," by Archibald Forbes.