We of the medical staff had four days of real hard work after the battle. There were an immense number of operations to perform; and as Osman Effendi and myself had to perform the greater number of them, our energies were taxed to the utmost. There were about forty doctors all told in Plevna, to deal with four thousand cases or thereabouts. Owing to the continuous nature of the work, I never went back to my quarters during the week after the battle, but used to sleep at the hospital. My Circassian servant cooked my food, such as it was, at my house, and brought it down to me while I was at work. As on the previous occasions, Osman Effendi and myself performed all operations in the open air under a big willow tree on the bank of the Tutchenitza, and in the shadow of an old Turkish mosque, where every evening at sundown an ancient priest, mounting a minaret, called the faithful to prayer. Although we were greatly assisted by the magnificent physique of the patients, still their extraordinary reluctance to undergo operations perceptibly increased the average mortality. Three days after the battle, I saw a Turkish soldier crawling slowly along the street and stopping every minute. He was holding some object in his hand, and his appearance was so strange that I went over and had a look at him. I found that he had been shot in the abdomen, and about two feet of the small intestine had prolapsed, and was protruding through the wound. It was so altered in appearance by exposure that it looked exactly like a bit of tarred rope. Two of this man's comrades had been wounded, and had died in the hospital--a fact which had made him believe that the hospital treatment was responsible for the fatal termination of their wounds, and he resolutely refused to allow me to touch him with an instrument. The intestine was not strangulated; and if he had allowed me to open up the wound, wash it, and replace the intestine, he would probably have recovered. As it was, he lived for fifteen days in that pitiable condition. The stoicism of the men was truly remarkable. A soldier was brought to me to be examined one day, and I found that he had been skylarking with a comrade, who had "jobbed" him in the stomach with his bayonet. The surgeon who first saw him could detect only a very small wound in the stomach, and he put a bit of plaster over the place and sent the man away. In a few hours' time the patient became very bad, and I was asked to see him. I asked him at once if he had vomited any blood; and when he replied in the affirmative, I knew that the wall of the abdomen had been perforated, and that his fate was sealed. He was quite cheerful, but he died at the end of twenty-four hours.