CHAPTER XXVI.
Complications and Conflagration.
Our heroine’s prognostication was verified—a military dictatorship succeeded to power during the unlooked-for interregnum in Russia, and cast in its lot with the most aggressive section of the Panslavonic party. The old quarrel with Turkey was revived, on a pretext about arrears of an indemnity due from ’77, and the upshot was that eighty thousand Russians, under General Polishoff, passed Kars, and marched upon Erzeroum. The terrified Sultan called upon Allah and his friends—that is, Turkish bondholders—all over Europe, to come to his aid in this extremity, and the Bungling Coalition, under pressure of influential capitalists, was weak enough to be drawn into an entanglement involving such national discredit that the sober judgment of the country succumbed for the time to the Jingo element, and an auxiliary expedition for the defence of Asia Minor was resolved upon.
The medley army of the Sultan had already scrambled together at the first alarm, and had been sent forward to the interior of Asia Minor, under Rhumbegar Pasha, chosen for the command simply because he was a palace favourite. He sustained a crushing defeat by the Russians, to the south-east of Erzeroum, and, hardly escaping with a few thousand men, retreated to Scutari, where he met the English force of fifteen thousand men, under Brigadier-General Burnfingal, hurrying to his support. On learning of Rhumbegar’s
