Autobiographical--My Wanderjahr--First Glimpse of Servians--Rome--A Prospective Mother-in-law--Sad Result of eating Chops--A Spanish Poet--The Chance of a Lifetime--How I seized it--Garcia's Gold Watch--The Via del Poppo--Off to London--Engaged by the Turkish Government--Vienna revisited--Stamboul--Origin of the Crescent--Misserie's Hotel--The Turkish Character--A Splendid Belvedere--View from the Seraskierat Tower--Scutari and Florence Nightingale--Stamboul by Day and Night--Scene in a Bazaar--Three Sundays a Week--A Trip to Sweet Waters--Veiled Beauties--I am gazetted to a Regiment--An Official Dinner--Off to the Front--A Compulsory Shave--My Charger--The March to Sofia--My First Patient--Prescription for a Malingerer--Mehemet Ali--My Soldier Servant--Diagnosing my Cases--Bulgarians at Home--At Sofia--MacGahan the War Correspondent--Learning Turkish--A Dinner in Camp--Leniency to Bulgarians--A Lady Patient--So near and yet so far--From Pirot to Nish--The Wounded--My First Operation. People have often asked me how it was that I, an Australian, came to take a part in the defence of the Ottoman Empire, and to serve as a military surgeon under the Red Crescent, which, as every one knows, is the Turkish equivalent of the Red Cross of the Geneva Convention. Red Cross and Red Crescent are alike the symbols of a humanitarian spirit, in which philosophers and students of ethics profess to see the small beginnings of a future age of universal peace; but as for me, I have seen how Cossacks and Circassians fight, and I cannot help regarding the future prophesied by the philosopher as an impossible dream. When one has seen a soldier of a civilized force sawing off the head of a wounded but still living enemy with the edge of his sword-bayonet, it requires an unusually optimistic nature to believe in the abolition of war and a perpetual comity of nations. It was as the outcome of my _Wanderjahr_--the sweet old German custom which sends every young man roaming when he has completed the technical training of his future avocation--that I first smelt powder and saw the glint of the Russian bayonets. The Wanderjahr of the German seems to be an unconscious survival of the nomadic instinct of primitive man--a small concession, as it were, to the roving habits that took his ancestors the Huns and Visigoths to Rome. It lets a young man escape from the fixed atmosphere of "staying point," as our American friends call it in one locality, into the "largior æther," the wider life of travel. And here I must be excused for introducing a little bit of necessary autobiography.