After the Battle of Sedan, fought on 1 September 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, O'Donovan joined the Foreign Legion of the French Army, and was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans.
[4] From 1876 O'Donovan represented the Daily News during the rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Turks, and in 1879, for the same paper, made his adventurous and famously hazardous journey to Merv.
Stewart, who was posing as an Armenian horse trader, expressed surprise that the journalist should be so intrepid, but O'Donovan had told him he was determined to record General Skobelev's troop movements in southern Transcaspia when staying at Mahometabad for weeks.
But O'Donovan resolutely decided on watching the Turcomans' stronghold of Geok Tepe, when the Russian advance began.
Astutely, O'Donovan refused to reveal Stewart's secret identity to the paper, but events were subsequently released in a book on The Merv Oasis as well as a report to the Royal Geographical Society.
[8] Viceroy Lord Curzon later wrote: I do not think that any sight could have impressed me more profoundly with the completeness of Russian conquest than the spectacle of these men, only eight years ago the bitter and determined enemies of Russia... What O'Donovan had witnessed was the end of Turcoman independence.
St. Petersburg, having dismissed General Skobelev, renounced all claim to Merv when the Tsar himself approached Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador.
The following year O'Donovan, still in search of adventure, accompanied the ill-fated expedition of Hicks Pasha to Turco-Egyptian Sudan;[4] he perished along with most of the Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force at the Battle of El Obeid.