The Perils of War Correspondents

1878

A war correspondent of the London Times writes from Giurgevo on the Danube: When I descended I found I was not the only Englishman in the train. Col. Wellesley, our military representative at the emperor's headquarters, had also come down from Bucharest after a couple of days' stay there. He was bound for Poradim, whither I was also going, and, like me, he had to find a carriage for himself and luggage.

We placed the luggage outside in front of the station under the portico, and the colonel left his servant, Jagor, who is a Russian, in charge, with instructions to get himself something to eat in the meantime at the buffet. We had hardly quitted the station five minutes when we heard the sound of a shell tearing its way through the air above our heads. The people about the street, which was the main one, ran right and left, and we heard the dull explosion of the iron missile somewhere near the railway station.

We did not know at that moment what terrible havoc that piece of iron had done, and what a terrible fate we had only just escaped. We went on, thinking but lightly of this single shot, until we entered a chemist's shop. A minute afterward a person who entered the shop told us that three soldiers had been killed at the station.

Although we were quite near, we both jumped into an open fiacre standing in the street, and were driven up to the station. We thought that the colonel's servant, Jagor, had possibly been hit. As we drove up, the first thing which met our view outside the station under the portico, on the very spot where we had left our luggage, was a large mass of something partly covered with a gray overcoat. Could this be Jagor? We got out of the carriage and came near. It was not Jagor; it was a soldier, or all that was left of the poor fellow. One side had been torn completely away, and there he lay in a pool of his own blood. The ground was torn up all around him, and the wall of the building was splashed with blood. Windows were smashed, the portico had been broken through, and the stone pavement was thickly strewn with human remains.

Col. Wellesley looked around for Jagor. Hearing the carriage drive up, the faithful servant immediately came out of the station, and, much to our relief, was quite unhurt. But he had the narrowest escape imaginable.

He showed us our luggage which he had dragged into the ticket office directly after the fatal shot. It was covered with blood, Another soldier, also, lay inside smashed to death. Both poor fellows were standing by our luggage outside the station, having been asked by Jagor to keep an eye upon the things while he went into the buffet to get a little refreshment. Jagor had scarcely sat down in the room, through the window of which he could himself see the things, when the shell struck the portico and burst with a report that almost stunned him. One of the soldiers fell across the iron stove of the colonel's, and completely washed it with blood.