The short day was almost drawing to a close, when the remnant of the fifth attacking corps returned, baffled and disheartened. The sun had already disappeared behind a bank of purple cloud, through which gleamed bars of lurid gold low down upon the rounded hills. Overhead there was a shimmering haze of Indian red. It almost seemed as if the sky had caught the reflection of the bloodstained earth.
To the ears of the Turks came the distant sound of voices hoarsely cheering. The sound was of no great strength, for Skobeleff himself had been voiceless all day, and the remainder—a mere handful of black-faced, wild madmen—were dry and parched.
“They must be nearly worn out,” said Osman quietly, upon receiving the latest report. “We will attack again, and take the redoubt before nightfall.”
Tefik merely acquiesced without comment, as was his wont, and turned away to give his orders with a close precision which inspired great confidence in his subordinates.
Presently he returned to where his chief was standing, not far removed from Theodore Trist, who was writing hard upon a gun-carriage.
“They want somebody to lead them,” said Tefik significantly. His contempt for the usual run of portly, comfortable Turkish line-officers was well known.
Trist looked up and saw that the commander was looking at his subordinate with calmly questioning eyes.
“I,” said the Englishman, closing his notebook as he came forward, “will go for one.”
“And I, and I, and I!” came from all sides. Some were staff-officers, some civilians, some old men and some mere boys.
“An Englishman,” said Tefik, with the faintest suggestion of a smile, “is too valuable to be refused! It would make all the difference.”
“I have been idle long enough,” answered Trist, in a voice laden with suppressed excitement. “I cannot stand it any longer.”
He closed his notebook, drew the elastic carefully over it, and raised his eyes to the strange, dishevelled group of men before him. The chief of this wonderful staff, Osman himself, held out his hand without a word, took the book, and dropped it into the pocket of his long blue cloak.
Already the call of the bugle told that preparations were in course—that the commander’s orders were being executed.
Before darkness lowered over the land the redoubt was again in the hands of the Turks. This is a matter of history—as also the fact that the flower of the Russian army lay all round Plevna for three months afterwards, and never gained an advantage equal to that which they had held for twenty-four hours. Osman was impregnable—Plevna unassailable, except by the slower weapon of bodily hunger—grim starvation.
It was nearly seven o’clock on the evening of the twelfth of September, before Tefik Bey, the grave young chief of staff, found time to visit the great double redoubt which had cost the Russian army over five thousand lives.
Accompanied by an orderly bearing a simple paraffin hurricane-lamp, he made his laborious way over the heaps of dead. Upon the hill above the redoubt the Turks lay in thousands. There were rows of them, shoulder to shoulder as they had charged, marking the effect of Skobeleff’s terrible volleys. Below the defence, upon the lower slope, the Russians covered the earth, and in the redoubt itself Muslim and Christian lay entangled in the throes of death. They were literally piled on the top of each other—a very storehouse of the dead—for the Russians had fought all day standing upon the bodies of the slain. Now the ready Turks trampled countryman and foe alike beneath their feet, for it was by no means certain that an attempt might not be made at once to regain the coveted position.
While crossing a ditch, that had been hastily cut by the Russians, Tefik stopped suddenly.
“Give me the lantern!” he said, in a peculiar short way.
Then he stooped over the body of a man who lay face downwards upon the blood-soaked turf.
“Turn him over!”
The flame of the hurricane-lamp flickered ruddily, and lighted up a calm, bland face. The firm lips were slightly parted in a smile, which seemed to be, in some subtle way, interrogative in its tendency. The eyes were wide open, but not unpleasantly so, and their expression was one of meek, gentle surprise. The whole incongruous face as it reposed there, looking upwards to its Creator, seemed to say, “Why?”
Tefik rose to his full height.
“Le philosophic,” he murmured, with a little shake of the head. “Ah! but that is a pity—a thousand pities!”
He stood with the lamp in his hand, gazing upwards at the stars, now peeping out in the rifts of heavy cloud. Unconsciously he had turned his grave young eyes to the West—towards civilization and England.
After a moment he turned and went on his way, stumbling in the dark over the dead and wounded.
XV
The End of It All
All through the rough autumn, and on into midwinter, Plevna held out. All the world waited and watched, sympathizing, as is its way, with the side where sheer pluck seems predominant.
At Wyl’s Hall, Mrs. Wylie and Brenda lived on in their quiet way; and, to these two, life soon assumed a calm, unruffled regularity. Small local incidents took to themselves a greater importance, and the larger events of the world reached them only as an echo.
As Winter laid its hand with increasing power over the land, so Wyvenwich found itself day by day more isolated from the world, until one morning in the middle of December the last link was severed. A great fall of snow, driven across the North Sea, besieged the Eastern counties, and for a time paralyzed all workers. The coastguards could do nothing, for they were hemmed in by great drifts on Mizzenheath Moor. The boats were full of snow, the roads impassable, and the small branch railroad hopelessly blocked by drifts, sixteen
