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Updated: June 16, 2025
Five times his men beat off the foe. The sixth charge hurled them first from the Kavanlik redoubt, and thereafter from the flanking works and trenches out on to that fatal slope. A war correspondent saw Skobeleff after this heart-breaking loss, "his face black with powder and smoke, his eyes haggard and bloodshot, and his voice quite gone. I never before saw such a picture of battle ."
By the close of the year more than forty miles were roughly laid down, and Skobeleff was ready for his final advance from Kizil Arvat towards Denghil Tepe. Meanwhile the Tekkes had gained reinforcements from their kinsmen in the Merv oasis, and had massed nearly 40,000 men so rumour ran at their stronghold.
Nevertheless, they offered no serious resistance to the Russian advance, doubtless because they hoped to increase the difficulties of his retreat after the repulse which they determined to inflict at their hill fortress. But Skobeleff excelled Lomakin in skill no less than in prowess and magnetic influence.
The fourth regiment struggled up into that wreath of death, and with the like result. Then Skobeleff called on his sharpshooters to drive home the onset. Riding on horseback before the invigorating lines, he swept on the stragglers and waverers until all of them came under the full blast of the Turkish flames vomited from the redoubt.
On January 5-8 Prince Mirsky threaded his way with a strong column through the deep snows of the Travna Pass, about twenty-five miles east of the Shipka, which he then approached; while Skobeleff struggled through a still more difficult defile west of the central position. The total strength of the Russians was 56,000 men.
"I fear that my warning was even more urgent than I thought it myself I mean, in point of time. Your Highness is already being watched." "What! A Prince of the Empire, the man whom they call the Modern Skobeleff, an intimate of Nicholas! What should I be watched for?" exclaimed the Prince, half angry and half astonished. "The thing is ridiculous; another of your dreams!"
But Osman's engineers had provided against such an event. The redoubt was dominated from the left and could be swept by cross fire from the rear and right. On the morrow the Turks drew in large forces from the north side and pressed the victors hard. In vain did Skobeleff send urgent messages for reinforcements to make good the gaps in his ranks. None were sent, or indeed could be sent.
He quotes with delight Chenery's approbation of her "Life of Skobeleff"; he spoke of you "with a gleam of kindliness in his eyes which really and truly I had never observed before." "The Times" quotes her as the "eloquent authoress of 'Russia and England'"; "fancy that from your enemy! you are getting even 'The Times' into your net." A later article on O. K. contains some praise, but more abuse.
But news came that this stronghold had been abandoned by its garrison, that the wildest panic prevailed, and that the Turkish population of the city and the surrounding villages was in full flight. At daylight of the 20th of January the city was entered by the cavalry, and on the 22d Skobeleff marched in with his infantry, at once despatching the cavalry in pursuit of the retreating enemy.
In less time than that Gourko and Skobeleff undertook to finish the business; by the vigour with which they forced their way across the Balkans in the heart of the bitter winter Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople fell into Russian hands; and the Russian troops had been halted some time almost in face of Constantinople when the treaty of San Stephano was signed on the 3rd of March 1878.
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