23 DECEMBER 1876, Page 20

FIVE YEARS IN BULGARIA.* AT the close of the Crimean

war, when a speedy recovery of health and reform of manners on the part of " the Sick Man " were

hopefully, if not confidently, looked for by the nations who, at much cost of blood and treasure, had again set him upon his feet, English capital flowed freely to his assistance, and English energy devoted itself cheerfully to the development of his material re- sources. Railways—that " note" of an advanced civilisation— were wanting as yet to Turkey ; to supply this want, and to re- present the spirit of British enterprise, three young men, brothers, 4' steamed into Varna Bay in an Austrian Lloyd boat soon after .daybreak on a fine September morning of 1857," and in the

September following turned the first sod of the first Turkish railway.

Singularly enough, this future highway of communication between nations was to run, for the most part, parallel with the great wall built by Trajan for their more complete severance. Of this wall Mr. Barclay tells us that when undermined for a width of ten feet, " it stood rigid as a bar of iron, not a stone tell, not a crack appeared. From end to end, where loose earth supported it, it was twelve feet long, twelve feet on the top and ten feet deep, all made of concrete, in which was mixed stones from ten to twelve inches square." Though the construction of the railway between Kustendjie, on the Black Sea, and Tcherna- voda, on the the Danube, was the sole object of the expatriation of our three young men, it is by no means the sole subject of this lively narrative by Mr. H. C. Barclay, who, with a younger brother, was, at the early age of twenty, launched on a rough life, under the experienced oversight of an elder brother, hereafter to be called by his workmen " Buyuk Tchel- laby," or "great gentleman." Of the engineering difficulties in the way of the three brothers we hear but little except on two occasions, once when a sudden rise of the Danube at the breaking- up of the winter's frost, threatened to ruin the labours of years in a single night ; and once at an earlier date, before the workmen had learned that an Englishman's word is to be trusted, when they rose and besieged the tent of the writer, clamouring for their pay ; "with bedding and blankets they encamped round our tent, while we, on our part, looked to our revolvers." A hasty ride to Varna to lay the state of affairs before the Tchellaby only resulted in an empty-banded return, amid the curses and revilings of the men who still kept up the stage of siege :—

"Matters remained like this till the last day of the month, when we were rejoiced, and I think, the men astonished, to see the Buyuk Tchellaby ride up to the tent, accompanied by some mounted police, and a horse with heavy saddle-bags. In spite of this, we heard through the canvas the men assuring each other that it was only a ruse, and that they were going to be swindled by the dogs of English. Early next morning we were astir, and after breakfast the Tchellaby, armed with a stout whip, stepped outside and addressed the men:—' Well, my lads, what do you think of yourselves? Yon have behaved in a nice manner, after agreeing to my offers!' Bat here he was cut short by a torrent of abuse, and a dozen of ferocious-looking Turks and Tartars made a rush at him. He stepped back, and then, like lightning, -came the hunting-whip among their outstretched hands, and at last on the head of the ringleader."

A general " helter-skelter " ensued, and petitions for mercy were sent in ; that of the ringleader is too quaint to be passed over,—" Gentlemen, I have behaved like a fool. I have lost a fortnight's work and a quantity of blood. You are all-powerful, and I am convinced, all-good. Have mercy on a fool, and allow him to work for you again, and pay him according to his behaviour." It is gratifying to add that in future days this man was accus- tomed to show a white mark on his shaven crown, as the door through which the Englishman had let out the devil from his brain ; and that by industry and skill he had acquired at the finishing of the railway a house, six bullocks, three cows, a small flock of sheep, and a wife.

Mr. Barclay on his return from his bootless errand to Varna brought back with him the Mr. Boulby who, in China, as special oorrespondent of the Times, was tortured to death by the Chinese. He had expressed some unwillingness to run himself into the midst of an emeute of workmen, and said once, as he sat listening to the threats of the men outside, that he could fancy nothing worse than being at the mercy of a horde of savage Tartars. We often, says Mr. Barclay, thought of this after we heard of his • Between the Danube and the Black Sea ; or, Five Years in Bulgaria, By Henry C. Barclay. London: John Murray. death. If there is little said by our writer on professional topics, he has plenty to say about the various races who worked under him, of the climate and soil, of the constant cruelty and misrule of the. Turkish officials, of those hardships pioneers have everywhere to experience, of narrow escapes from death by cold (it is no infrequent thing to find people frozen

to death as hard as stones), of sport over the wild plain of the Dobrudja—where the Bulgar peasant pastures his flocks of poor and undersized sheep—of "moving accidents by flood and field," in his hurried journeys, all of which things are related with an easy jollity that would have done Mark Tapley credit under the same circumstances.

One of the most interesting chapters in the memoir of the great contractor, Thomas Brassey, compares the working powers of the different Western races, and decides that no work is equal to that of a British navvy as a test of strength of muscle and of will in the worker. Mr. Barclay has some noteworthy observations to make on the men who laid the Kustendjie and Tchernavoda railway :—

" At one time we counted, among the heterogeneous mass, thirty- two different languages and dialects, but yet, with a few exceptiols, Turkish was used by them all for every-day purposes. Amongst the natives proper, far the best and most intelligent workmen were the Bulgars, and with proper education and good example, they were capable of doing anything They are a steady, quiet, hard- working set of people, patient and unresisting under the Turkish yoke, but at the same time not cringing or servile like their brother Christians, the Greeks and Armenians, and I have no doubt that, were the Turk banished out of Bulgaria, the Bulgars would soon convert it into one of the finest and most prosperous countries of Eastern Europe. As much as possible we employed these men on the line, and in after- years some of them became fitters, cleaners, locomotive-drivers, and in fact, filled all the places of skilled workmen ; and it is wonderful, when one bears in mind how few had been their advantages, to think how they excelled. We had large gangs of Turks, but they are never really good workmen, owing to their utter inability to stick long to one thing As the poaching loafer of a country village often becomes quite a hero in such an emergency as a fire or an inundation, so is the Turk good at

a pinch, but for steady, continuous work give me the Bulgar We always employed large gangs of Tartars, and found them excellent workmen, but as I shall have occasion to write about them further on, I will not do so now."

In this preface, written after the outrages in Bulgaria, Mr. Barclay gives a very brief but effective sketch of the Bulgarian at home, from which we will take the following anecdote, showing how, in some cases, good roads are not conducive to the prosperity of a country :— " About twelve miles from Varna, and not far off the route -to Shumla, is the flourishing village of Gebedji, which is partly Turkish, partly Bulgar. On entering it one is at once struck by the appear- ance of prosperity exhibited in the well-built houses and large flocks of cattle. Between this village and the road is a swamp, with a narrow but deep brook running through it. To assist in the construction of the line, which passed by the village, I caused a road to be made across the marsh, and a wooden bridge thrown over the brook. The first night after the bridge was completed it was cut down, and on making inquiries about it, a Turk told me that rather than live with this easy access to the road, the inhabitants, both Turks and Bulgars, would burn their houses and migrate to some spot where Turkish Officials, Turkish troops, and above all, Turkish zaptiehs, could not so easily get at them,—above all, the zaptiehs (mounted police), for they are the constant and never-ending curse of all the villages, whether Turkish or Bulgar. They are recruited from the very lowest and most ruffianly of the Turks. Many of them, if not most, have been brigands, and all are robbers. Their pay (even when they get it) is not sufficient to support them, and therefore they depend on their position to secure the comforts of life. They live on the peasants, and all they have, from their horse to their pipe, has been robbed from them. Over and over again I have seen every woman and girl of an entire Christian village disappear as if by magic at the approach of a zaptieh, and when he enters the village, all the men stand staring about watching to see what may take place, like a flock of sheep when a strange dog comes among them."

The simile of a flock of sheep is but too suitable to the Bulgarian peasantry, and like sheep hay e they been slaughtered.

Of the virtue and modest behaviour of the Bulgarian women the author speaks in high terms, and his experience—at the head of so large a body of workmen—was not a limited one. The in- stances he gives of the cruel oppression of local rulers would well compare even with " recent events," and this was ten years ago, at the time when we and the other Western nations had taken the power of becoming sole protector of the Eastern Christians out of the bands of Russia, for the purpose, it would almost seem,—at any rate, with the result—of leaving them quite helpless at the mercy of their oppressors.

While Mr. Barclay was at Kustendjie he witnessed on a small scale one of those great movements of the Tartar hordes which in former times often changed the face of Europe and altered

the destinies of kingdoms. "Asa few bees," he says, " announce

by their buzzing the swarming of a hive," so a few straggling Tartars came from the Crimean shores, precursors of the great invasion. Soon "eighty thousand Tartars landed at Kus-

tendjie alone." Hundreds had died at sea of small-pox and fever ; dozens of dead were found left behind in the holds of the wretched, ill-found Turkish ships which had brought them across ; many died in the railway-waggons, and were thrown out by their friends as the train moved on ; others were left where they died. Still the immigration rolled on to the interior, and "in a few years these hard-working and enterprising people had quite changed the face of the Dobrudja the great grass plains were ploughed up, and the entire country converted into a vast field of corn."

We have not space to give our readers a true idea of the more amusing aspects of life in Bulgaria. The taste of our author in the selection of his illustrations is sometimes questionable, but rough ways go with rough places, and a more refined delicacy would have made the picture less complete and less graphic. The tone of feeling throughout is excellent, and we could desire no better employment for a wet day than turning the leaves of Mr. Barclay's cheery narrative of his labours between the Black Sea and the Danube.