Characters

"It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it abolishes itself from below."

The 'Tsar-Liberator' who had freed Russia's serfs in 1861, Alexander II went to war in 1877 driven by Pan-Slavic sentiment and the cause of the Balkan Christians rising against Ottoman rule. He accompanied his armies to the Danube and shared in the anxieties of the long agony before Plevna, though he left the field command to his brother and generals. Victory restored Russian prestige after the humiliation of the Crimean War, but the meagre gains left after the Great Powers forced the Treaty of Berlin embittered Russian opinion. At home, Alexander's era of reform gave way to reaction and rising revolutionary terrorism; in March 1881, only weeks after the war's veterans had marched home, he was killed by a bomb thrown by a member of the People's Will on a St Petersburg street.

"I hold to the rule: in war, do to your enemy all the harm you can."

The 'White General' — so called for the white uniform and white horse in which he deliberately rode into the thickest fire — was the most charismatic and popular soldier of the war. Fearless to the point of theatricality, Skobelev made his name storming Lovcha and leading the desperate assaults on the Plevna redoubts, where his men briefly seized positions the rest of the army could not hold. His crowning moment came at Sheinovo, where his columns descended from the frozen Shipka heights to envelop and capture an entire Ottoman army. Idolised by his troops and by the Russian public, and an outspoken Pan-Slav who alarmed the courts of Europe with fiery nationalist speeches, he died suddenly and mysteriously in a Moscow hotel in 1882, aged only thirty-eight — prompting endless rumours of poison or political murder.

"We shall cross the Balkans in winter, when the enemy believes it impossible."

A cavalry general of iron will, Iosif Gurko led the advance guard that first pushed across the Balkan Mountains in the summer of 1877, and then executed the campaign's boldest stroke. After storming Gorni Dubnik to help seal Plevna, he drove his army over the snowbound passes in the depths of winter — a feat the Ottomans thought impossible — took Sofia, and shattered Suleiman Pasha's army at Plovdiv. His mid-winter offensive broke the back of Ottoman resistance in Bulgaria and carried the Russians toward Constantinople. Ruthless and demanding, Gurko drove his men through blizzards and mountain ice at fearful cost, but his campaign is regarded as a masterpiece of determination. He later governed Russian Poland for many years as a hardline administrator.

"You cannot storm Plevna — you must strangle it."

Russia's foremost military engineer, famous for his masterful defence of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, Totleben was summoned to Plevna after three bloody frontal assaults had failed. He immediately halted the futile storming and imposed a scientific, total blockade — ringing Osman Pasha's fortress with siege works and cutting every supply line until hunger did what bayonets could not. His patient method starved the garrison into its doomed breakout and surrender in December 1877, ending the campaign's central crisis. Totleben's career embodied the war's grim central lesson: against entrenched troops with modern rifles, the spade and the blockade were mightier than the massed assault. He later commanded the final advance and served as a senior administrator.

"The heights must be turned by night if they cannot be taken by day."

An Armenian nobleman in Russian service, Loris-Melikov commanded the war's other front — the Caucasus — where he outmanoeuvred and destroyed the Ottoman army of Ahmed Muhtar Pasha at the Aladzha Heights and then stormed the great fortress of Kars in a daring night assault. His victories won Russia the lasting territorial prizes of the war in eastern Anatolia. Afterwards Loris-Melikov rose to remarkable political heights: as a trusted minister of Alexander II he headed the campaign against revolutionary terrorism and drafted cautious constitutional reforms — the very plans the Tsar approved on the day he was assassinated in 1881. With Alexander's death and the reaction that followed, Loris-Melikov's reforms were shelved and he retired abroad.

"Romania needs this war to be born as a nation."

The German-born prince Carol I brought Romania — still nominally an Ottoman vassal — into the war on Russia's side, and his intervention proved decisive at the moment of crisis. When the second Russian assault on Plevna failed, it was Carol, given overall command of the allied siege forces, and his Romanian army that helped storm the redoubts and complete the encirclement of Osman Pasha. Romanian troops paid heavily in blood at Plevna and Grivitsa, and in return Romania emerged from the war fully independent of the Ottoman Empire, its sovereignty recognised at the Congress of Berlin. In 1881 Carol crowned himself the first King of Romania with a crown forged from a captured Ottoman cannon, and he reigned for nearly half a century as the founder of modern Romanian statehood.

"As long as one of my soldiers can stand, Plevna will not fall."

The defender of Plevna and the hero of the Ottoman war effort, Osman Nuri Pasha seized the undefended crossroads town after the fall of Nikopol and there conducted one of the great defensive stands of the 19th century. For five months his entrenched army threw back assault after assault, inflicting staggering losses and pinning the whole Russian invasion in place. When starvation finally forced him to attempt a breakout in December 1877, Osman was wounded and captured — and treated with honour by his enemies, who saluted his defence. He returned to Constantinople a national hero bearing the title 'Gazi' (the Victorious), and served the Sultan as marshal and palace official for the rest of his life. His stand made 'Plevna' a synonym across Europe for heroic, doomed defence.

"The pass must be taken whatever the cost."

An energetic and ambitious Ottoman commander, Suleiman Pasha led the ferocious summer assaults on the Russian and Bulgarian defenders of the Shipka Pass, hurling his men up the bare slopes again and again at terrible cost without ever quite breaking through. His failure to take Shipka — and his poor coordination with Osman Pasha at Plevna — became a subject of bitter recrimination. Given command of the last Ottoman armies in Thrace, he was decisively beaten by Gurko at Plovdiv in January 1878 as Ottoman resistance collapsed. Blamed for the catastrophe, Suleiman was court-martialled after the war, convicted, and disgraced. His career embodied the Ottoman tragedy of the war: brave, aggressive soldiers undone by divided command, poor logistics, and an enemy who had learned to entrench.

"We fought until the mountains themselves gave way."

The ablest Ottoman commander on the Caucasus front, Ahmed Muhtar Pasha waged a skilful defensive campaign in eastern Anatolia, winning early actions and earning the honorific 'Gazi' before he was finally overwhelmed by Loris-Melikov's superior numbers at the Aladzha Heights and forced to give up Kars. He survived the disaster with his reputation as a soldier largely intact and went on to a long and distinguished career, serving as Ottoman high commissioner in Egypt and, briefly in 1912, as Grand Vizier of the Empire during the crisis of the Balkan Wars. He lived to see the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, dying in 1919 as the empire he had served for six decades disintegrated.