On the fifth day after the Battle of Constantinople ended, August 20, 1897, Ferdinand finally received the final casualty report!
The figures were horrifying:
First Guards Division: 3,476 casualties, including 615 dead and 187 severely wounded and permanently disabled.
First Infantry Division: 2,846 casualties, including 586 dead and 118 severely wounded and permanently disabled.
Eighth Infantry Division: 3,126 casualties, including 827 dead and 86 severely wounded and permanently disabled.
Among the First Army's original five main-force divisions, every division had suffered no fewer casualties than an entire regiment. The four second-rate divisions had also taken grievous losses. With the several reinforcement divisions transferred in later, total casualties had climbed to more than 38,000!
The moment he saw that number, Ferdinand's heart nearly leaped out of his chest! Fortunately, medical support had been fairly good, and most of the wounded could still recover.
Of course, "fairly good" was by nineteenth-century standards. Bulgarian field hospitals had made extensive use of the primitive disinfectant—carbolic acid—and had also prepared large quantities of alcohol to cleanse wounds, effectively suppressing wound suppuration!
As for Western medicine, it was still far too expensive in this era. Nor was it particularly effective, while its side effects were enormous.
Ferdinand understood that, for wounded men on the battlefield, the greatest problem was not how effective the medicine was, but whether there was medicine to use at all!
For this reason, Ferdinand had even sent people to the Manchu Qing to purchase a batch of traditional Chinese medicine! People of this era were still rather easy to fool. To make the soldiers accept Chinese medicine, Ferdinand had led by example and personally advertised it once!
In truth, when he had been suffering from internal heat, he had merely drunk a bowl of boiled coptis decoction! Mainly because he was