An ominous silence was maintained by our Russian besiegers, and we found that they had withdrawn the greater number of the troops from Erzeroum in order to carry out the assault on Kars. Typhus, pyæmia, pneumonia, and the bitter, deadening cold were working for the Russians, and slew as many of the defenders of Erzeroum daily as would have fallen under the heaviest shell fire. Woods became ill; and as there was evidently heavy work before us, I sent him down to Constantinople, thus reducing the strength of our little medical garrison by one. Snow began to fall heavily, and soon the streets were covered to a depth of several feet. At night the thermometer dropped to forty degrees below freezing-point, and the soldiers in the open suffered severely. Every morning five or six men were found frozen to death on outpost duty, lying in the snow with their eyes closed and their rifles clasped in their arms. Meanwhile General Melikoff was making preparations for his great attack on Kars, and at last the long expected assault was delivered, and the Russians with their strange, untranslatable cry of "Nichivo," which is the ultimate expression of a reckless bravery that refuses to count any cost, swept in upon the Turkish batteries, and took the town. Melikoff could not accommodate his numerous wounded prisoners with quarters, so he conceived the brilliant idea of sending them on to us; and, presenting each man who could walk with a blanket and a few piastres, he despatched the men on their journey from Kars to Erzeroum. What a march was that! The snow lay thickly on the frozen ground, and for league after league the legion of the wounded dragged themselves along, staining the snow with their blood as they "blazed" their pathway from Kars to Erzeroum. Hundreds dropped dead on that terrible march, and Mukhtar Pasha told me that out of two thousand men who left Kars only three hundred and seventeen reached Erzeroum. About fifty of the survivors came to our hospital, and one of them told me that he left with a party of thirty, only ten of whom came through alive, and of these ten no fewer than seven lost all their toes from frostbite. Some typical cases of frostbite were grotesque in their ghastliness. Fancy the experience of two men who came to us for treatment after dragging their wounded bodies over the hundred and eighty miles of snow that separated Kars from Erzeroum. Their hands had been frost-bitten early in the march, and for the last week nothing was left but the skeleton of each hand from the wrist to the finger-tips. Every particle of flesh had rotted off, and the bones were black with decomposition. They came to me holding out their blackened skeleton hands feebly and pitifully before them, and I lopped off the maimed remnants at the wrists. Both these men died from the effects of that terrible march, which not even the lurid imagination of a Dante could easily rival.