Awful Tragedy In The Balkan Mountains

Awful Tragedy in The Balkan Mountains

It is doubtful whether there is any single one among the long list of telescopically revealed tragedies that can vie in dramatic intensity with that which was seen by the Russian General Radetzky early in January, 1878, while sweeping with a powerful military glass the exit from the Shipka pass.

He was expecting two battalions of infantry, armed, alert and vigorous. Instead there debouched from amid the icy Balkan fastness a few score strange looking figures, who stumbled and staggered like drunken men as they walked and waved their arms stiffly in wild, unmeaning signals to their comrades below.

Even as he looked some of them fell to rise no more, and only little clouds of feathery powdered snow, ascending like columns of smoke in thin, clear air, marked where they still struggled feebly.

Then the horror of the thing began to occur to the general. While he stood there warmly comfortable in the more moderate temperatures of the plains men were being frozen to death before his eyes high up in the mountains.

THE TROOPS EMERGED FROM THE PASS.