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The war began between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his boots, his saddle, his horse.
Andreas knew that MacGahan was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly droll how he purred and bridled under the light touch of that genial humourist, whose merits his own countrymen, to my thinking, have never adequately recognised. The old story of a prophet having scant honour in his own country.
The happy days when they were guests of the army, when news was served to them by the men who made the news, when Archibald Forbes and Frank Millet shared the same mess with the future Czar of Russia, when MacGahan slept in the tent with Skobeleff and Kipling rode with Roberts, have passed.
He was an Ohio boy, and his early schooling had been obtained in old-time American fashion in a little log school; where, by the way, one of the other boys was Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, afterward the famous war correspondent and friend of Skobeloff.
But the doctor was firm that during the now imminent winter I was not to return to the field. Fortunately, my able colleagues, MacGahan and Millet, were there; and I was therefore the less distressed by Dr. 's peremptory sentence on me. I was condemned to return to England as soon as I should be strong enough to travel.
Fitz James O'Brien was "a bright, particular star" in the journalistic firmament; John MacGahan achieved fame as a war correspondent; Patrick Barry of Rochester, an extensive writer on horticultural and kindred subjects, was the recognized leader of his craft in the United States; and William Darby, son of Patrick and Mary Darby, and Michael Twomey were the ablest American geographers and writers on abstruse scientific subjects.
It had been done by MacGahan, but that plucky journalist had judiciously started in the spring. Burnaby resolved to accomplish the enterprise in winter; and accordingly, on November 30th, 1875, he started by way of St. Petersburg, treating himself, as a foretaste of the joys that awaited him on the steppes, to the long lonely ride through Russia in midwinter.
MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take greater care of his invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity occurred to him, the campaign would ipso facto come to an end.
All of them were de facto Republicans, and had more knowledge and enjoyment of Republican freedom than those who prattled and raved of Republicanism in Madrid and the south; but they did not take kindly to the name. As my friend the late J. A. MacGahan wittily said of them "They were the Royalist-Republicans of Spain."
Father Zahm told me that MacGahan even at that time added an utter fearlessness to chivalric tenderness for the weak, and was the defender of any small boy who was oppressed by a larger one. Later Father Zahm was at Notre Dame University, in Indiana, with Maurice Egan, whom, when I was President, I appointed minister to Denmark.
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