The General marched them up to the spot where they had left their rifles, and ordered them to take them up and follow him. Then he led them out into the space in front of the trench, right in the line of the Turkish fire, and there he put them through their exercises, standing with his back to the Turks, while the bullets could be heard whistling over and around them. Only two of them were hit during this strange drill. Then he let them go back to their trenches, saying: “The next time any one of you runs away, he will be shot!” The investment of Plevna went on relentlessly through October, November, and part of December. By the 9th almost all their food was exhausted, and Osman determined to try one last sortie before surrendering. Herbert had charge of a train of a battalion outside the town. He made up a fire, saw his men installed for the night, and then walked to the town. A snowfall was coming down lazily; bivouac fires lit up the gaunt figures of men and beasts. The men, talking of to-morrow’s fight in a subdued tone, were yet excited and eager. Many Turkish residents, with their carts and vehicles, were spending the night on the snow-covered plain, the men brooding and gloomy, the veiled women sobbing, the children playing hide-and-seek around the fires and among the carts. It was a weird sight--all these thousands eager to go out after the army when the last struggle should have carved them an open road through the surrounding foe. At head-quarters an officer met Herbert, and asked him to post some labels at the ambulance doors of a certain street. He says: “Armed with a brush and paste-pot, I turned bill-sticker, and affixed a notice on some twenty house doors which were showing the ambulance flag. Anything more dismal than that deserted town, abandoned by all but dying and helpless men and some 400 starving Bulgarian families, cannot be imagined. Desolate, dead, God-forsaken Plevna during the night of the 9th and 10th of December was no more like the thriving and pretty Plevna of July than the decaying corpse of an old hag is like the living body of a blooming girl. The streets, unlighted and empty, save for a slouching outcast here and there bent on rapine, echoed to the metallic ring of my solitary steps; while occasional groans or curses proceeding from the interior of the ambulances haunted me long afterwards as sounding unearthly in the dark. Twice I stumbled over corpses which had been thrust into the gutter as the quickest way of getting rid of them. “As I walked I had to shake myself and pinch my flesh, so much like the phantasy of an ugly dream was the scene to my mind. As I plied my brush on the door-panels, I felt like one alive in a gigantic graveyard.