Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [151]
Every piece of revolutionary propaganda received and each intelligence report read served to bolster the fear. Was the government in Constantinople to disregard the terrorist threats made by the Bulgarian revolutionaries? The insurgents wrote: “Herzegovina is fighting; Montenegro is spreading over the mountains and coming with help; Serbia is ready to put its forces on the move; Greece is about to declare war; Rumania will not remain neutral. Is there any doubt that death is hanging over Turkey?”18 In July 1875, at Nevesinje in Herzegovina, the clan chiefs had met and thrown down a challenge to the Turks. One declared:
Ever since the damned day of Kosovo [Polje, in 1389] the Turk robs us of our life and liberty. Is it not a shame, a shame before all the world, that we bear the arms of heroes and yet are called Turkish subjects? All Christendom waits for us to rise on behalf of our treasured freedom … Today is our opportunity to rebel and to engage in bloody fight.19
This guerrilla war, in Harold Temperley’s view, led directly to the revolt in Bulgaria and all that followed. It was a cruel war on both sides. The first things that British consul Holmes saw as he entered Nevesinje were a Turkish boy’s head blackening in the sun, and a bloody froth bubbling from the slit throat of a young Turkish girl.20
In both India and the Balkans fact was quickly conflated with myth. But it was sometimes the myths that stuck in the memory. Yet securing a mass response was not an easy matter: it required a rising sense of drama and horror, a quasi-theatrical style of presentation. Sir Edwin Pears recalled the Bulgarian horrors of 1876 in his memoirs:
They had seen dogs feeding on human remains, heaps of human skulls, skeletons nearly entire, rotting clothing, human hair, and flesh putrid and lying in one foul heap. They saw the town with not a roof left, with women here and there wailing their dead amid the ruins. They examined the heap and found that the skulls and skeletons were all small and that the clothing was that of women and girls. MacGahan counted a hundred skulls immediately around him. The skeletons were headless, showing that these victims had been beheaded.
Further on they saw the skeletons of two little children lying side by side with frightful sabre cuts on their little skulls. MacGahan remarked that the number of children killed in these massacres was something enormous. They heard on trustworthy authority from eye-witnesses that they were often spiked on bayonets.
There was not a house beneath the ruins of which he and Mr. Schuyler did not see human remains, and the streets were strewn with them.21 When they drew nigh the church they found the ground covered with skeletons and lots of putrid flesh. In the church itself the sight was so appalling that I do not care to reproduce the terrible description given by Mr. MacGahan.22
Januarius MacGahan was an experienced war reporter; his first account from the front was published in the Daily News in London on August 7, 1876. On the same day, an official report read out in the House of Commons confirmed MacGahan’s gruesome details. More and more column inches kept Bulgaria in the public mind. A longer and even more horrific dispatch from MacGahan appeared on August 16. Thirteen days later American consul Schuyler’s preliminary report to the U.S. government was printed in full in the Daily News. This added further fuel to the fire. All the earlier warnings, from May 1876 onward, some accurate, others fanciful, were confirmed.23 Gladstone’s pamphlet crystallized an existing popular feeling of horror and revulsion. He began to formulate his own contribution to the campaign against the Ottomans even before he had seen Schuyler’s report. He wrote in a white heat—by September 1, 1876, he had already completed more than half of it.24