Under the Red Crescent: Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and Erzeroum 1877-1878

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

What does courage look like when skill, supplies, and hope have all run out? Under the Red Crescent, Charles S. Ryan's memoir of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, finds its answer in his service as an army surgeon at the age of twenty-one. At Plevna he operated beneath a willow tree, amputated without adequate anaesthetic, and watched antiseptics give way to bazaar cloth and cotton-wool alive with maggots. Anyone who has struggled to remain useful when nothing can be made right will recognize the moral pressure at the heart of this extraordinary memoir.

Ryan gives the listener more than battlefield horror. The style of Under the Red Crescent is at once accessible, riveting and endearing. His account is candid about fear, inexperience, and despair, yet alive with the black comedy by which exhausted people preserve their sanity. It also unsettles the inherited picture of “the barbarous Turk”. Ryan loved the Ottoman soldiers he treated, while the atrocities reported two decades later forced him to confront what loyalty can and cannot explain.

Few siege narratives bring the listener so close to the operating table, the redoubt, and the limits of endurance. This Hidden Treasure Publishing edition extends Ryan’s testimony with a newly written epilogue recounting the extraordinary events four decades after the events of Ryan's narrative.