A Russian diplomatist, Prince Tserteleff, who was charged to collect information about the passes, found that the Khainkoi enjoyed an evil reputation.  “Ill luck awaits him who crosses the Khainkoi Pass,” so ran the local proverb.  He therefore determined to try it; by dint of questioning the friendly Bulgarian peasantry he found one man who had been through it once, and that was two years before with an ox-cart.  Where an ox-cart could go, a light mountain gun could go.  Accordingly, the Prince and General Rauch went with 200 Cossacks to explore the pass, set the men to work at the worst places, and, thanks to the secrecy observed by the peasantry, soon made the path to the summit practicable for cavalry and light guns.  The Prince disguised himself as a Bulgarian shepherd to examine the southern outlet; and, on his bringing a favourable report, 11,000 men of Gurko’s command began to thread the intricacies of the defile.

Thanks to good food, stout hearts, jokes, and songs, they managed to get the guns up the worst places.  Then began the perils of the descent.  But the Turks knew nothing of their effort, else it might have ended far otherwise.  At the southern end 300 Turkish regulars were peacefully smoking their pipes and cooking their food when the Cossack and Rifles in the vanguard burst upon them, drove them headlong, and seized the village of Khainkoi.  A pass over the Balkans had been secured at the cost of two men killed and three wounded.  Gurko was almost justified in sending to the Grand Duke Nicholas the proud vaunt that none but Russian soldiers could have brought field artillery over such a pass, and in the short space of three days (July 11-14)[140].

[Footnote 140:  General Gurko’s Advance Guard In 1877, by Colonel Epauchin, translated by H. Havelock (The Wolseley Series, 1900), ch. ii.; The Daily News War Correspondence (1877), pp. 263-270.]

After bringing his column of 11,000 men through the pass, Gurko drove off four Turkish battalions sent against him from the Shipka Pass and Kazanlik.  Next he sent out bands of Cossacks to spread terror southwards, and delude the Turks into the belief that he meant to strike at the important towns, Jeni Zagra and Eski Zagra, on the road to Adrianople.  Having thus caused them to loosen their grip on Kazanlik and the Shipka, he wheeled his main force to the westward (leaving 3500 men to hold the exit of the Khainkoi), and drove the Turks successively from positions in front of the town, from the town itself, and then from the village of Shipka.  Above that place towered the mighty wall of the Balkans, lessened somewhat at the pass itself, but presenting even there a seemingly impregnable position.

Gurko, however, relied on the discouragement of the Turkish garrison after the defeats of their comrades, and at seeing their positions turned on the south while they were also threatened on the north.  For another Russian column had advanced from Tirnova up the more gradual northern slopes of the Balkans, and now began to hammer at the defences of the pass on that side.  The garrison consisted of six and a half battalions under Khulussi Pasha, and the wreckage of five battalions already badly beaten by Gurko’s column.  These, with one battery of artillery, held the pass and the neighbouring peaks, which they had in part fortified.