124 ISLAM AT WAR
tanbul. He decided to go to Bulgaria and investigate these stories. He
proceeded to send a series of telegrams from Batak and Philipopolis that
struck the world press like a bomb and aroused the horror and indignation
of the western world. Gladstone, a former prime minister, declared that
the Turks must be thrown out “bag and baggage” from the Bulgarian
provinces. His pamphlet on the topic, which sold 50,000 copies—and
netted him a neat £12,000—said, “Five million Bulgarians, cowed and
beaten down to the ground, hardly venturing to look upwards, even to
their Father in Heaven, have extended their hands to you.” This was fiery
stuff to the straitlaced moralists of the high Victorian era.
In Bulgaria, MacGahan, accompanied by Eugene Schuyler, the Amer-
ican consul-general in Turkey, sent telegrams that described how on ap-
proaching a town they found skulls scattered about and a ghastly heap of
skeletons. His report, which appeared in theDaily Newson August 7,
1876, went:
I counted from the saddle a hundred skulls, picked and licked clean: all of
women and children. We entered the town. On every side were skulls and
skeletons charred among the ruins, or lying entire where they fell in their
clothing. They were skeletons of girls and women with long brown hair
hanging to their skulls. We approached the church. There these remains
were more frequent, until the ground was literally covered with skeletons,
skulls and putrefying bodies in clothing. Between the church and the school
there were heaps. The stench was fearful. We entered the churchyard. The
sight was more dreadful. The whole churchyard for three feet deep was
festering with dead bodies partly covered—hands, legs, arms, and heads
projected in ghastly confusion. I saw many little hands, heads and feet of
children of three years of age, the girls with heads covered in beautiful hair.
The church was still worse. The floor was covered with rotting bodies quite
uncovered. I never imagined anything so fearful. There were three thousand
bodies in the churchyard and church....Intheschool, a fine building, two
hundred women and children had been burnt alive. All over the town were
the same scenes....Themanwhodidallthis, Achmed Aga, has been
promoted and is still Governor of the district. The newspaper accounts were
not exaggerated. They could not be. No crime invented by Turkish ferocity
was left uncommitted.MacGahan went on in further letters describing barbarities, bayoneting
of babies tossed into the air, paraded around the streets on the points of
bayonets, and so on. However true these stories of MacGahan’s may or
may not have been, cannot be determined today. Numerous sources, how-