might be with them. I spent a couple of days in distributing tobacco and
bread in the hospitals and among the thirty thousand wretches herded
shelterless in the snow. There were some of the mounted gensdarmes among
them, and I even found several Hungarians; but none of them had ever
heard of the circus-rider.

The passage of the Balkans was a campaign full of excitement, and was
accompanied by so much hardship that selfishness got entirely the upper
hand of me, and life became a battle for physical comfort. After the
passage of the mountain range we went ahead so fast that I had little
opportunity, even if I had the enterprise, to look among the few
prisoners for the circus-rider.

Time passed, and we were at the end of a three days' fight near
Philippopolis, in the middle of January. Suleiman Pasha's army,
defeated, disorganized, and at last disbanded, though to that day still
unconquered, had finished the tragic act of its last campaign with the
heroic stand made in the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains, near
Stanimaka, south of Philippopolis. A long month in the terrible cold, on
the summits of the Balkan range; the forced retreat through the snow
after the battle of Taskosen; the neck-and-neck race with the Russians
down the valley of the Maritza; finally, the hot little battle on the
river-bank, and the two days of hand-to-hand struggle in the vine-yard
of Stanimaka--this was a campaign to break the constitution of any
soldier. Days without food, nights without shelter from the mountain
blasts, always marching and always fighting, supplies and baggage lost,
ammunition and artillery gone--human nature could hold out no longer,
and the Turkish army dissolved away into the defiles of the Rhodopes.
Unfortunately for her, Turkey has no literature to chronicle, no art to
perpetuate the heroism of her defenders.