I remember well the first time that I ever heard a shot fired in war. I was sitting in my little Bulgarian hotel on the bank of the river with Colonel Stracey, who afterwards commanded the Scots Guards. He had been inspecting the Russian army at Kischeneff, and between the time that he left them and his arrival at Widdin war was declared. When he came to the hotel where I was staying, I was delighted to see him, since he was the first Englishman, apart from the war correspondents, the notorious Dr. Black, and my friend Jack, the engineer of the Government mill, whom I had met in the town. We were having lunch together, when we heard a loud "boom" apparently close at hand, followed almost immediately by the distant roar of a heavy gun; and before we could realize what was happening, a shell struck the end of the hotel and crashed through two rooms, bringing bricks and plaster down in all directions with clouds of dust. The bombardment from Kalafat had begun at last, provoked by a shot from a Turkish gunboat on the river; and within a few minutes the shells were shrieking over us, the women were screaming, and valorous old Turks were running out of their houses armed with rusty flintlocks or anything in the shape of a weapon that they could get hold of. Now and then a shell came crashing into the hotel; and as it stood in an isolated position on the bank of the river affording a capital target for the enemy's fire, it soon became too hot a corner to remain in. So it was shut up, and Stracey and I, both of whom were then under fire for the first time, moved farther back into the town, where I had secured a house for myself on the previous day in anticipation of some such trouble. The firing went on for about three hours, and all the women in the town were of course terribly frightened, and were rushing about shrieking and weeping, not knowing what to do. It was curious to see the behaviour of the different nationalities in the hour of danger. Most of the Spanish women gathered together under the walls of the fortress, where they erected a roof of mats with the fortress wall as a support. Here they were perfectly safe from the Roumanian shells, which either struck the wall on the outside or else passed over it, dropping much farther in the natural course of their trajectory. The Turkish women huddled together in two large alcoves in the wall of the archway leading into the fortress, refuges which were almost like dungeons hewn out of the solid masonry, and which were absolutely safe from projectiles. When the firing was over I went to the hospital, and found that four or five people had been wounded. A Spanish boy had lost his arm, and a Turkish woman had been killed by a shell bursting in her room. One unpleasant result of the bombardment was that Stracey and I had nothing to eat all night, as all the butchers and bakers in Widdin were down in their cellars, and no amount of money would induce them to come out. They put