Oh, the monotonous horror of that march! We were dead tired when we started; and all through the dark night the men stumbled blindly on, forbidden to sing or even to speak, lest they might betray their presence to the scouts of the enemy. Silent, sleepless, footsore, sick for want of food, and faint for want of water, they marched on the long road to Plevna. Our commander was Emin Bey, and we had about fifty cavalry scouts with us, but no guns. I rode behind Weinberger, and at about two o'clock in the morning his horse pitched head foremost into a deep hole in the track, and I went after him. The two of us with our horses floundered out of the hole somehow or other, and we fortunately escaped with a few bruises; but my archæological treasures were lost, my Greek vases tied up in the sheepskin were smashed to atoms, and all my sacrilegious enterprise had gone for nothing.
Next night the men were so tired that we had to camp for a couple of hours in the open plain, as they could positively go no farther without a rest. My horse had had hardly anything to eat all day; so I rode away a hundred yards from the main body to a place where there was some good grass, and decided to let him have a feed. I tied the reins round my wrist, and went to sleep on the open plain. When I woke up all was silent, for the troops had gone, and so had my horse, while I knew that the country all round was swarming with Cossacks. It was not a nice predicament to be in; but luckily my horse, a beautiful little Arab stallion and very quiet, had not strayed far, and I easily caught and mounted him. Then I went in pursuit of the troops, and by a combination of luck and judgment I found them before I had ridden many miles.
We lost half a dozen men next day from sunstroke; and I could do nothing to save the poor fellows, who simply dropped in their tracks, and had to be left to die at the side of the road. We had hardly any water, and the men suffered terribly, the feet of numbers of them being quite raw with continual marching. I bound up their feet as well as I could with linen and old rags, but the men who wore sandals were much better off than those who wore boots; and the severity of the march may be guessed from the fact that, while the advanced guard consisted of one thousand seven hundred men when it started, there remained only one thousand three hundred when it reached Plevna. The others had dropped out on the way, and those that remained alive were picked up by the waggons following the main body behind us.