I was sent to take charge of a large building which had been converted into a hospital, and was already overcrowded with the most pitiable cases. The building stood in several acres of ground on the bank of the Tutchenitza, and about a quarter of a mile from the town, up stream. It had previously been occupied by a wealthy Turk, and consisted really of two large houses, one behind the other, and connected by a passage. The house in the rear had been the harem, while the one in front had been occupied by the old Turk and the male members of the household. There was a small well kept garden leading up to the central entrance, and a picket fence with a gate shut it off from the road. There were two large rooms, one on each side of the front door, and two more behind the staircase, with others upstairs and in the building attached at the rear. Altogether there must have been about twelve large rooms, high, fairly well ventilated, and whitewashed; but more than half of them had no beds, and the forms of the tortured soldiers were huddled together in their clothes on the bare boards. When I went there first, I had two hundred and fifty men to look after, and the task appeared such a hopeless one that my heart sank within me. We had a hundred beds in the hospital, and a small supply of extra mattresses and blankets; but those were soon apportioned, and for the other unfortunates nothing remained but to lie huddled up on the floor in the clothes in which they had been shot. They lay on the floor of the passages as well as in the rooms, and were packed so closely that it was most difficult to pick one's way through the hospital without treading on them. In one room, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, I had sixteen men, all hideously wounded, dying hard on the hard boards. The bare, whitewashed walls were splashed with blood, which had turned to rusty dark brown stains, and the horrors of the place can only be faintly hinted at. I was the only medical man on duty in that hospital, with a couple of jarra bashis, or dispensers, to assist in dressing, and a squad of Turkish soldiers as hospital nurses. I had chloroform, it is true, but no other drugs of any kind; for the first supply of medicines, as I have explained before, fell into the hands of the Russians when they captured the tail waggons of the convoy. Worse than all, I saw with dismay that the stock of antiseptic dressings was giving out, and that unless it could be replenished the fearful scourge of hospital gangrene was already threatening us closely.