The Russians retreated from the Danube, fighting off the Turks, who pursued them, smelling blood. The Russian troops were tired and demoralized, many of the soldiers had not eaten for days, and there were so many sick and wounded that they could not all be taken back by cart. Thousands were abandoned to the Turks. At the fortress town of Giurgevo, on 7 July, the Russians lost 3,000 men in a battle with the Turkish forces (some of them commanded by British officers) who crossed the river from Rusçuk and attacked the Russians with the support of a British gunboat. Gorchakov arrived with reinforcements from the abandoned siege of Silistria, but was soon forced to order a retreat. The Union Jack was planted on the fortress of Giurgevo, where the Turks then took savage revenge on the Russians, killing more than 1,400 wounded men, cutting off their heads and mutilating their bodies, while Omer Pasha and the British officers looked on.29
The Turkish reprisals had a clear religious character. As soon as the town was cleared of Russians troops, the Turkish troops (Bashi Bazouks and Albanians) ransacked the homes and churches of its Christian population, most of them Bulgarians. The entire Christian population left Giurgevo with the Russian infantry, hurriedly packing their belongings onto carts and heading north with their columns. A French officer described the scene he found in Giurgevo a few weeks after its abandonment:
The Russians, in departing, left only 25 inhabitants out of a population of 12,000 people! Only a handful of houses were intact … The looters were not content to pillage only houses. Several churches were ransacked. I saw with my own eyes a Greek church which I found in a dreadful state. An old Bulgarian sacristan was clearing up the broken icons and church windows, the sculptures, lamps and other sacred objects piled up in the sanctuary. I asked him in sign language who had committed these atrocities, the Russians or the Turks. ‘Turkos’ he replied in a single word, his teeth clenched and in a tone that promised no redemption for the first Bashi Bazouk who fell into his hands.30
In every town and village the Russian troops passed through, they were joined by other refugees afraid of Turkish reprisals. There were scenes of chaos and panic on the roads, as thousands of Bulgarian peasants left their villages with their livestock and joined the ever-growing columns of humanity in flight. The roads became so badly blocked with peasant carts that the Russian retreat was slowed down, and Gorchakov considered using troops to hold back the refugees. But he was talked out it by his senior officers, and in the end some 7,000 Bulgarian families were evacuated to Russia. Tolstoy described the scene in one village in a letter to his aunt which he wrote on reaching Bucharest on 19 July:
There was one village that I went into from the camp to fetch milk and fruit that had been destroyed [by the Turks]. As soon as the Prince [Gorchakov] had let the Bulgarians know that those who wanted to could cross the Danube with the army and become Russian subjects, the whole country rose up, and all of them, with their wives, children, horses and cattle, came down to the bridge, but as it was impossible to take them all, the Prince was obliged to refuse those who came last, and you should have seen how much that grieved him; he received all the deputations coming from these poor people, he chatted with each of them, tried to explain to them the impossibility of the thing, proposed to them that they cross without their carts and cattle, and, taking upon himself their means of subsistence until they should reach Russia, paid out of his own purse for private vessels to transport them.31
In Bucharest, there were similar scenes of confusion. Many of the disaffected Russian troops took the opportunity to desert from their units and went into hiding in the city, prompting the military authorities to issue dire threats to the population to give up any deserters or risk punishment. The Wallachian volunteers, who had joined the Russian troops on their occupation of the principality, now melted away, many of them fleeing south to join the allies. Evacuating the city, the Russians issued a dark warning to the ‘treacherous Wallachians’ in a manifesto from the Tsar:
