In the town of Plevna we had plenty of accommodation for the wounded, and all the arrangements for attending to them were in far better order than on the occasion of the first battle. When the main hospital was full, we sent the men off to the smaller hospitals, and many of the less serious cases lay out in the open air all night. It was a repetition in many respects of our experience after the first battle; for we had forty-eight hours of almost continuous work, and then the great bulk of the men were put into carts and sent away to Sofia. On the first night after the artillery firing had ceased, all was quiet, and the only sounds to be heard in the town were the cries and moans of the wounded and the loud creaking of the great wooden-wheeled waggons as they rolled over the cobble-stones outside. As I have said, we were much better prepared for the reception of the wounded than after the first battle; for we had plenty of instruments, chloroform, antiseptic solutions, and bandages, and, moreover, we had trained a number of the soldiers to act as an ambulance corps. These assistants were able to help us very materially, and had become quite expert dressers. In the majority of cases the wounds were very severe, as the men had fought principally in the trenches, and when hit they were generally shot either through the head or right through the chest. On August 1 I got away from the hospital at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and rode out to have a look at the battle-field. Near the spot where the Grivitza redoubt was afterwards built the Russian dead lay thickest, and within a space of about two acres on this rising slope I counted fifteen hundred bodies. The spectacle was a horrifying one. Turkish burial parties had already been out burying our dead; but the Russians were left where they fell. Nearly all of them were absolutely naked, for the Bashi-Bazouks had been there already, and had stripped them of arms and clothing completely. I could not help noticing the difference in physique between the Russian soldiers and the Turks. The Russians were far less robust, and many of them seemed to be mere lads, hardly equal to the task of carrying the heavy Berdan or Krenke rifle. Broken gun carriages lay on every side, and the ground was scarred and torn in all directions. A number of wounded horses, lying on the ground unable to rise, were neighing pitifully, and farther off two or three more with broken legs and entrails hanging out were dragging themselves slowly and painfully to a pool of water that had collected in a hollow at the foot of a hill. I shot four of the unfortunate creatures with my revolver, and put them out of their misery.