Lords of the Golden Horn by Noel Barber

Author:Noel Barber [Barber, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ottoman Empire, History
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

The peaceful little Bulgarian town of 17,000 people, where the last great battle between Russia and Turkey was fought in the summer and winter of 1877, lay in a deep valley, the hillsides covered with vineyards and fields of Indian corn almost ripe for harvesting. On three sides ridges, defiles, ravines, rocky escarpments made Plevna almost impregnable. On the fourth it was protected by a large hill studded with orchards. Its strategic importance was that it was a road junction on the River Vid.

Facing Plevna from the north, a Russian army of 180,000 men, with 800 guns, waited to pounce. Already Russian troops had easily captured the Turkish stronghold of Nikopoli on the Danube, twenty miles to the north, while other Russian forces had taken the Shipka Pass, the mountain gateway through the Balkans. They had met with only dispirited Turkish resistance and there seemed no reason why Plevna should not fall just as easily, leaving the road to Sofia and Constantinople wide open.

For once Abdul Hamid reacted promptly to the threat. He telegraphed an urgent message to the Turkish Army at Widden on the Upper Danube which was under the command of Osman Pasha, ordering him to march to Plevna with all speed. ‘The Ottoman Empire’, he cabled, ‘lies between life and death.’

Osman Pasha, at forty already a veteran of the Crimean War, was a soldier’s soldier. Short, taciturn, he had a commanding, dignified presence and a sense of iron discipline, and at dawn on 13 July his army of 50,000 men set off for Plevna, 120 miles away. Each soldier in the ten-mile-long column carried a week’s supply of biscuits so hard they could be broken only by a hammer before being soaked in water.

On reaching Plevna on ig July, Osman Pasha toured the hills and scattered villages that encircled the valley and concluded that, apart from nature’s ramparts, Plevna was totally undefended.

Knowing that before long the Czar would launch the whole weight of his army against him, Osman’s first task was to dig trenches and redoubts.

The bulk of the Russian Army was camped north and east of Plevna, so Osman felt certain the first attacks would come from that direction, where Plevna was dominated by a ridge called Janik Bair, four miles long and nearly 400 feet above the valley. Digging in shifts, lit by camp fires after dark, Osman’s troops worked for twenty-four hours a day on earthworks. Trenches and gun emplacements lined the actual saddle of the ridge for three and a half miles, ending up near a village called Grivitza, east of Plevna. Behind it Osman Pasha built two great redoubts - known as the Grivitza redoubts - with walls twenty feet thick and twenty feet high, protected by moats and trenches angled to fire on Russians who might try to bypass them. Each redoubt held a thousand men in comparative comfort. Requisitioned furniture was hauled up the slopes, sleeping-chambers and storerooms were built into the walls. A magazine was dug deep under the earthen floor.

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