A week or more elapsed before Mukhtar Pasha, hurrying from Mostar, could concentrate troops enough to clear the road and provision Trebinje, and then he succeeded only by the most infantile blunders on the part of the Christian forces. From that time until the spring there was a succession of isolated conflicts with no connection, the Turks attempting to provision the little fortresses in the mountains, and the insurgents to damage the Turks as much as opportunity permitted. The powers were by this time thoroughly aroused, and the Austrian intervention followed. Baron Rodich, the governor of Dalmatia, called a conference of the insurgent chiefs at Sutorina to arrange a pacification. I went to see Rodich, a shrewd, precise functionary, liberal, as far as one could well be in his position, and I saw at once that, while he was determined to obey his orders, and urge a pacification because it was in accordance with his orders, he had no faith in success, and had a great sympathy with the insurgents. He was peremptory, and had a soldier-like aversion to special correspondents; but he was very just, and might have done much had the situation admitted any other result than the fighting it out. The Turks would make no concession and admit no reverse, and the insurgents, having been victorious in three out of four combats, and having brought the Turkish forces into the most desperate demoralization (as I was able to learn by the Turkish deserters who came daily into Ragusa), were not in the least disposed to relinquish the hold on the position they had won. In the rude shelter obtainable within the Austrian territory there were thousands of women, children, and wounded men, supported by the charity of Europe, now largely excited, leaving the active insurgents free for their operations.

At Ragusa I watched the course of events with informants in every part of the field of action, having become by this time regarded as the unflinching friend of the insurrection, to whom all good Slavs were under obligation of service. I then made the acquaintance and acquired the friendship of that admirable diplomat whose subsequent career and mine have repeatedly crossed each other, Sir Edward Monson, then diplomatic agent at Ragusa, and of a brave and good soldier, the Austrian commander, General Ivanovich, of whom and of whose excellent family I have the most delightful recollections, and whose society during all the time I remained in Ragusa was my sole social refuge from the wretched life of a special correspondent in half-civilized regions. It was a poetic and attractive household, and the light of it, the beauty of Madame Ivanovich and her two daughters, and the serenity which fell on me when I entered it, remain in my memory as the sunny oasis in the life of that period. Then, too, I made the acquaintance of an eminent scholar who was to be for many years after the stanchest of friends and allies, Professor Freeman, the great historian, but greater humanitarian, whose too early death I still feel to be my great personal loss. He had two companions, of whom one was Lord Morley, who had come to Ragusa to see what there was in the affair of the Herzegovina; and to their impressions was no doubt due much of the weight given to the "Times" reports subsequently.

Between fruitless negotiations, attempts to delude the insurgents by insincere promises, and the greatest efforts on the part of my soi-disant friend, Danish Effendi, to win over the body of correspondents by this time collected at Ragusa (he told me in so many words that he had informed the Turkish government that my pen was worth 40,000 francs to it), the rest of the winter passed away quietly. It was evident that war would be declared in the spring between the principalities and Turkey, and I went home thoroughly worn out and ill. I went by the way of Venice, and had my first sight of the city coming in at early morning from Trieste by steamer. Accustomed as I had been to the color of Turner as the aspect of the Grand Canal, it seemed to me that what I saw from the steamer was the ghost of Venice, pallid, wan, faded to tints which were only the suggestion of Turner's, but still lovely in their fading, and the impression was more pathetic than it would have been with all the glow of the great Englishman's palette. My wife met me at the steamer, and we went home by short stages, for I was too weak to bear a long railway journey.



CHAPTER XXX

THE WAR OF 1876

I returned to Montenegro in the following June, after the diplomacy of Europe had vainly and discordantly discussed mediation all the winter. An armistice had suspended hostilities, but the Turks continued the concentration of troops on the frontiers of the principality, north and south, and refused the conditions of the Prince for a peaceful solution. Everything waited for the acceptance by Servia of the programme for the war which was to be declared by the principalities against Turkey. The official declaration of war took place on the 2d of July, and on the 3d the Prince set out with flying banners for the conquest of the Herzegovina. My orders being to remain in touch with the telegraph, I had to resign the pleasure of the campaign, and I passed the time in studying up accessories. The Prince started directly for Mostar, accompanied by the Austrian military attach, Colonel Thoemel, one of the most intensely anti-Montenegrin Austrian officials I ever met. If the Austrian government had intended to inflict on the Prince the most humiliating censor in its service, and make the relations between the governments as bad as possible, they could not have chosen an agent more effective than Thoemel. In his hatred of Montenegro and enjoyment of the fortiter in re, he entirely threw off the suaviter in modo. He enjoyed intensely every petty humiliation he could inflict on the Prince, who, with the greatest tact, never noticed his rudeness. The maintenance of good relations with Austria tasked the Prince's diplomacy to the utmost. As I saw nothing of the campaign, I will dispose of it by saying that, when the Prince had nearly reached Mostar, the colonel informed him officially that if he took Mostar he would be driven out of it by the Austrian army, and, after a slight skirmish on the hills commanding the city, the Prince took the road towards Trebinje. Meanwhile the operations on the southern frontier, under the direction of the amiable and competent Bozo Petrovich, remained for my observation.

One of the chiefs of clans who were waiting at Cettinje for the plan of the southern campaign was Marko Millianoff, hereditary chief of the Kutchi, an independent Slav tribe on the borders of Albania, generally allied in the frontier operations with the Montenegrins. The Turks desired particularly to subdue this people in the outset of the campaign, as their territory commanded the upper road from Podgoritza to Danilograd, and hostilities commenced with an attack on them. While waiting I made the acquaintance of Marko, whom I found to be one of the most interesting characters I met in Montenegro. His courage and resource in stratagem were proverbial in the principality. I had a capital Ross field-glass, and amused him one day by showing its powers. He had never seen a telescope before, and his delight over it was childlike. "Why," he exclaimed in rapture, "this is worth a thousand men." "Then take it," I said, "and I hope it will prove worth a thousand men." His force of 2500 men was then blockading the little fortress of Medun, a remotely detached item of the defensive system of Podgoritza, and on the next day he set out for his post.

I saw him some months later, and he told me that when the great sortie from Podgoritza to relieve Medun came in view of the blockading force, though at a distance of several miles, his men declared that they could not fight that immense army, which filled the valley with its numbers and had the appearance of a force many times greater than their own. Marko looked at it through the glass and found it to be mainly a provision train, for Medun was on the verge of starvation, the garrison having "shaken out the last grain of rice from their bags," to use the expression of the moment. When Marko's men found the actual number of fighting men in the Turkish sortie, they decided to fight it out. They didn't mind ten to one, they said, but much more than that had appeared to confront them. The Turks, commanded by Mahmoud Pasha, a good Hungarian general, were about 20,000 men,—as I afterwards learned from various sources, including the English consulate at Scutari,—comprising 7000 Zebeks, barbarians from the country back of Smyrna, accustomed to the yataghan, and supposed to be qualified opponents of the Montenegrins in the employment of the cold steel. Marko fought retreating from the morning until about 2 P.M., when the Turks stopped to eat, having driven the Montenegrin force back and toward Medun about three miles. When the Turks had eaten and began to smoke, Millianoff gave the word to charge; and though the Turks had built thirteen breastworks to fall back on as they advanced, they yielded to the vigorous assault of the first line, and the Montenegrins swept through the whole series with a rush, not permitting the Turks to form again or gather behind one, and drove those who escaped under the walls of Podgoritza, leaving 4700 dead on the way, for no prisoners were taken. Millianoff said, when I saw him again, "Your glass saved us the battle," which was virtually the preservation of the independence of the tribe, and possibly the decision of the campaign on that side. The fortress was obliged, a little later, to surrender, and in the subsequent siege of Niksich the artillery taken at Medun served a very good purpose, being heavier than anything the Montenegrins had.

I had secured for correspondent with the Prince the services of his Swiss secretary, an excellent fellow by the name of Duby; and, as all the interest of the war for the moment lay in the campaign of the Prince against Mostar and its consequences, I arranged to have my news at Ragusa by telegraph, and there I went for the time being. On the 28th of July I received at 11 P.M. the news of the battle of Vucidol, in which the army of Mukhtar Pasha was routed and nearly destroyed, Mukhtar himself barely escaping by the speed of his horse, entering the gate of Bilek only a hundred yards in advance of his foremost pursuer, his wounded horse falling in the gateway. Of his two brigadiers, one, Selim Pasha, a most competent and prudent general, was killed, and the other, Osman Pasha, the Circassian, taken prisoner. He lost all his artillery, and thirteen out of twenty-five battalions of regulars, two hundred prisoners being taken; but while these were en route to Cettinje they became alarmed and showed a disposition to be refractory, and were put to death at once by the escort. The ways of warfare in those parts were, in spite of all the orders of the Prince, utterly uncivilized, the Montenegrin wounded being always put to death if they fell into the hands of the enemy, and no quarter being given in battle by the Montenegrins, though Turks who surrendered in a siege were kept as prisoners during the war. I had seen Mukhtar at Ragusa during the conference at the time of the armistice, and he bore out in his personal appearance the description which Osman Pasha gave of him,—dreamy, fanatical, ascetic, who gave his confidence to no one, and who said, when Selim proposed a council of war before Vucidol, "If my fez knew what was in my head I would burn it," and refused to listen to the cautionary measures Selim advised preliminary to the attack. The ascetic and the fanatic was written in his face. Returning to Cettinje, I found Osman there a prisoner on parole, and at my intercession he was permitted to accompany me to Ragusa, where I returned after a few days, life in Montenegro being intolerably dull except during the fighting.

The next movement on the part of the Turks, which was expected to be one by Dervish Pasha, from the base of Podgoritza towards Cettinje, called me into the field again. We took position along the heights of Koumani, on the verge of the great table-land which intervenes between Rieka and Danilograd, and from which we could see the Turkish camps spread out on the plain below us; and if the Turks had but known where we were, they might have thrown their shells from the blockhouses in the plain into our camp. There was no attack for the moment, and the scouts of the Montenegrins used to amuse themselves by arousing the Turkish camps in the night or by stealing the horses and mules from the guards set over them. A band of seven stole, during this suspension of operations, forty horses and brought them into the camp, and one, more cunning and light-footed than the rest, stole the pasha's favorite horse from the tent where he was guarded by two soldiers sleeping at the entrance, and brought him to the Prince at Koumani. He had to take the precaution of wrapping the creature's hoofs in rags before bringing him out of the tent. When the object was to stir the Turks out of their rest, a half-dozen men would crawl up to the stone wall which they invariably threw up around the camp, and lay their rifles on it, for there was never a sentry set, and fire rapidly into the tents as many shots as they could before rousing the camp, and then scatter and run. The whole battalion would turn out and continue firing in every direction over the country for half an hour, while the artillery, as soon as the guns could be manned, followed the example, and almost every night we were roused from our sleep by the booming of the guns.

The early collapse of the Servian defense led, after some negotiations, to a truce, and diplomacy took up the matter, and in September I went home again. The "Times" correspondence had given the Montenegrin question serious importance in England, and during the winter I had several opportunities to discuss it with men of influence, amongst whom were Gladstone and the Marquis of Bath, who invited me to pass some days at Longleat to inform him more completely on it. During my last stay in Montenegro I had been informed by Miss Irby—one of the women who distinguish their English race by their angelic charity and works for humanity, and who, being engaged in benevolent work in Bosnia, became one of my firm allies—that reports had been put in circulation in London against my probity and the trustworthiness of my correspondence, imputing to me indeed a conduct which would have excluded me from honorable society. This was the work of the pro-Turkish party, enraged by the sympathy evoked by my correspondence on behalf of the Montenegrins, and Sir Henry Elliott had made himself the mouthpiece of it. Mr. Gladstone, having become warmly interested in the little mountain principality by my correspondence, had taken its case up in a strong review article, and had persuaded Tennyson to devote a sonnet to it. He was, as he himself informed me, warned by Sir Henry Elliott not to trust to my letters or to employ them as authority for his work, for Sir Henry said that I was considered in the Levant, where I was well known, to be an infamous and untrustworthy character. Mr. Gladstone, therefore, though he used my facts, referred them to the authority of a second-hand version. Fortunately for me and my work, Professor Freeman had heard the reports in question, and knowing me personally, and taking the passionate interest he did in the war against the Turks, applied himself to the investigation of the tales, and satisfied himself and Gladstone that they were simple libels, without a shadow of foundation, and even had never been heard of until they were promulgated in London. They were the coinage of political passion.

Gladstone sent me word through Freeman that he wished me to call on him to receive personally his apologies for having believed and been influenced by them, and I went to see him as he requested for that purpose. He told me at the same time that though he did not usually read the "Times," he had taken it to read my letters. He asked me many questions about the principality, showing his great interest, as well as his political acumen, and amongst the questions was one which, at the time, gave me great thought, and still retains its significance. It was, "Have the Montenegrins any institutions on which a national future can be built?" He was desirous of knowing if Montenegro could be made the nucleus of a great south Slavonic organization. I was unable to give him any assurance of the existence of anything beyond the primitive and patriarchal state which fitted its present position, in which a personal government by a wise prince is sufficient to reach all the needs of the population. And to-day I am of the opinion that a greatly enlarged Montenegro would run the danger of becoming a little Russia, in which the best ruler would be lost in the intricacies of the intrigues and personal ambitions that facilitate corruption and injustice, and where the worst ruler might easily become a curse to all his neighbors. Gladstone's good-will had its issue later in the enforced restitution to Montenegro of the district of Antivari and Dulcigno, which the Montenegrin army had taken, but evacuated, pending the disposition of the congress which after S. Stefano regulated the treaty of peace.

Lord Bath, beside the political question, was interested in the religious situation of the principality, which has maintained its national existence and character through its form of ecclesiastical organization, that of the Orthodox faith. He had sent me on two occasions considerable sums of money for the wounded and the families of the killed in the war, and always took a vivid interest in its fortunes. He repeated to me a conversation he had had at Longleat with Beaconsfield, in which he had asked the minister what interest England had in Montenegro that induced the government to give it aid and countenance, as it did after a certain stage in the war. Beaconsfield had replied that "England had no interest whatever in Montenegro, but that the letters in the 'Times' had created such an enthusiasm for the principality that the government had been obliged to take it into account." The Prince was fully informed on this score, and he and all his people recognized the debt they owed the "Times," and, as an exception to all my political experience, they have shown themselves a grateful people, and Prince as well as people have always shown their gratitude in all ways that I could permit. The Greeks almost unanimously became hostile to me when I became the advocate of a Slavonic emancipation, and of the Hellenic friends I made while in Crete, Tricoupi alone of men of rank remained my personal friend after the Montenegrin campaigns.

Amongst the Russian fellow campaigners there were several with whom I contracted friendships which endure, chief among them being Wassiltchikoff, the head of the Red Cross staff, who was also dispenser of the bountiful contributions of the Russian committees for the wounded and the families of the killed. I must confess a strong liking for the Russian individual, and I have hardly known a Russian whom I did not take to, in spite of a looseness in matters of veracity in which they are so unlike the Anglo-Saxon in general. I think that the time is coming when the evolution of the Russian character will make the race the dominant one in Europe; and that, when the vices inherent in a people governed despotically have been outgrown, they will develop a magnificent civilization, which, in poetry, in music, and in art, even, may distance the West of to-day. But in the crude and maleficent despotic form of government which now obtains, they are likely to menace for a long time the well-being of the world. The struggle between the German and the Slav, however long it may be postponed, is inevitable, and the defeat of the German secures the Russian domination of Europe. Napoleon's alternative, "Cossack or Republican," is substantially prophetic, though the terms are more probably "Despotic or Constitutional." I have no animosity toward Russia, but any advance of her influence in the Balkans seems to me to be a battle gained by her in this conflict. Established at Constantinople, her next stage would be Trieste; and the ultimate Russification of all the little Slavonic nationalities of the Balkans, of which she is now the champion, becomes inevitable. The only safeguard against this is the maintenance of Austria as the suzerain power in the peninsula.

But, for the personal Russian, as I have said, I have always had a thorough liking, and all through the Montenegrin campaigns I held those who were there as warm friends. The official Russians were not, however, popular in Montenegro, the people possessing an unusual degree of independence, and the Russians attaching more importance to their aid and coperation than the circumstances made it politic to show; and Jonine, who became minister-resident at Cettinje, was, perhaps, the most unpopular foreigner there, while Monson, who became English agent there, was, both with prince and public, the most popular. The entry into the alliance with Russia made little difference in the sentiments of the people, and even the Prince resisted, in an extraordinary and even impolitic degree, the Russian suggestions in the conduct of the war.



CHAPTER XXXI

RUSSIAN INTERVENTION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF 1877

With the return of spring I resumed my position, and when I arrived at Cettinje, in the beginning of April, the situation was one which made it politic for the Sultan, had he known his pressing interests, to yield to the conditions on which peace could have been preserved. Montenegro held a position stronger than that of the year before, and the Prince, under diplomatic pressure, withdrew the conditions which he had originally insisted on, except two, viz., the recognition of the independence of the Kutchi and the repatriation of the refugees from Herzegovina, with guarantees for their tranquillity. This latter was a sine qua non of the restoration of Montenegro to its original condition, for the principality was supporting on the slender basis of its always insufficient means a population almost equal to its own, and was already in a state approaching famine. Russia was sending shiploads of corn, and English charity was, as it always is, large, but the retention of the refugees permanently was impossible, even with foreign aid. They were destitute not merely of homes but of earthly goods, to an extent that made them as helpless as children, for there was no more work to be done in the principality than the women were accustomed to do in war time.

Russia declared war on the 25th of April, and the English agent left four days later, warmly saluted by the Prince, who had found in him a true and disinterested friend. Jonine's animosity towards Monson was intense, and as the former, as Russian plenipotentiary, considered himself entitled to give direction to the diplomacy of Cettinje, he was furious over the evident favor with which Monson was regarded by the Prince, who often followed his advice. It was a sore point with the Montenegrins, from the Prince down, that Jonine was so officious in his intervention even in military advice, where he had not the least competence; and in general the Montenegrins resented the dictation of the Russian staff, even where it had every reason to urge its own views of the operations. On the occasion of the next birthday of the Czar, which was as usual celebrated in Montenegro by a diplomatic and official dinner, the Prince refused to come to the table, sending Duby to preside. Jonine was extremely unpopular with Prince and people, owing to his dictatorial ways. The Austrian representative had an opening to great influence which he might have seized if he had been a man of tact, but he was ostentatiously hostile to the Prince and the Montenegrin cause. Monson, on the other hand, and Greene, the English consul at Scutari, exerted their influence in every way for the principality, and but for them the supplies of grain from Russia, which had been sent on during the armistice and had been maliciously delayed by the authorities at Scutari as they came by water through the Boyana, would probably have been stopped at the critical moment by the outbreak of hostilities.

The news of the declaration of war by Russia produced immense enthusiasm in the principality, and the people now felt that they were in a position to fight out with the Turks the quarrel of four hundred years. With the Prince and his staff, I went to the new headquarters at Orealuk, where he had a little villa nearly midway between the pass to the plain of Niksich and Podgoritza. The southern frontier was held by the division of "Bozo" (Bozidar) Petrovich on the west of the Zeta, and on the east by that of the minister of war, Plamenaz, posted on the heights over Spuz. They were opposed by Ali Saib Pasha and two or three subordinate generals. On the north, at Krstaz, was Vucotich, the father-in-law of the Prince, a brave man, but neither a good general nor a good administrator, and to his incompetence as strategist the Montenegrins were indebted for the egregious failure of the northern defense. This failure at one moment menaced the total collapse of the Montenegrin campaign, from which the ability of Bozo saved it. Suleiman Pasha, later distinguished by his Bulgarian campaign, had replaced Mukhtar, and had spent three months in drilling and disciplining his troops for the Montenegrin method of fighting. The terrible passes of the Duga offered ideal positions for a defense by such a force as the Montenegrin,—brave, good shots, and absolutely obedient to orders; and the best military advice on our side pronounced them impregnable if properly defended.

So the Prince went to Ostrog, and the northern army took position on the plain of Niksich, the advance posts being connected with headquarters at Ostrog by telegraph, and I took up my quarters with the Prince in the convent. With great ability, Suleiman out-manoeuvred Vucotich in the Duga, and debouched in the plain near Niksich before the Montenegrin army could reach Plamnitza, where the valley of the Zeta and our position at Ostrog were to be defended, and if Suleiman had pushed on without stopping to recruit he might have taken us all in our quarters. The mendacious dispatches of victory from the Montenegrin commander gave us to believe that the Turks were kept at bay, until we found that they were actually in Niksich, and there was not a single battalion to serve as bodyguard to the Prince at Ostrog. Simultaneously with the attack on Duga, the army of Ali Saib attacked on the south; but, defeated most disastrously two days in succession, was obliged to relinquish the effort to meet Suleiman in Danilograd, where, if united, they would have held the principality by the throat.

The reports of the fight from Bozo sent me down to get the details of the victory, of which he had given me by telegraph a summary account, and I arrived at his headquarters at Plana, overlooking the Turkish movements, late that afternoon, accepting an invitation to pass the night and see the operations of the next day. Until I arrived at his camp Bozo had received no information of the passage of the Duga, nor of the relief of Niksich; but I had not been with him two hours before we saw the smoke arising from the villages on the northern slopes of the heights that commanded the head of the valley of the Zeta, which connects the plains of Niksich and Podgoritza and divides Montenegro into two provinces, anciently two principalities,—the Berdas and the Czernagora or Black Mountain. This conflagration showed that Suleiman had crowned the heights, and would have no more difficulty in descending through the valley to Danilograd. Suleiman's campaign was planned on the idea of a triple attack on the heart of Montenegro, by himself from Krstaz, Ali Saib from Spuz, and Mehemet Ali, my old friend in Crete, from Kolashin via the upper Moratsha, the three armies to meet at Danilograd. Ali Saib and Mehemet Ali were disastrously defeated, though before I left Plana in the morning a third attack from Spuz was begun, and fought out under my eyes while I waited, the Turks being driven back again.

I started for a leisurely ride back to Ostrog, and half way there met a fugitive who told me that the Turks were at the convent, and the Prince retreating on the western side of the valley. Another half hour and I should have been in the hands of the irregulars, who were skirmishing and burning, killing and plundering, as they followed the eastern side, the two armies being hotly engaged in the forests along the crest of the mountains above us around Ostrog. I retrograded to Plana, and thence, by the urgent counsels of Bozo, to Cettinje, as the position was critical, and the campaign might take an unexpected turn and make my escape impossible.

The army of Suleiman took ten days of fighting to cover the distance I had made in three hours' leisurely ride, and reached the plain of Spuz so exhausted and decimated that Suleiman had to reorganize it before he could make another move. He had narrowly escaped a great disaster, possibly the surrender of his whole army, only by the incompetence of the Montenegrin commander. He had abandoned all his communications with Niksich, like Sherman at Atlanta in the American war, and had to depend on what he carried with him, for the country offered nothing. Vucotich, instead of intrenching himself with his main force in the woods in front of Suleiman, adopted the tactics of opening to let him pass, and then attacking him in the rear, though he was strong enough to have stopped him and starved him into surrender. As it was he lost 10,000 men in the passage of the Bjelopawlitze. At this moment the English consul at Scutari, Mr. Greene, came to Cettinje and visited the camp of Suleiman, in which visit I wished to imitate him, but he warned me that it would be probably a fatal call, as I would not have been allowed to return. Mr. Greene gave me Suleiman's account of the fighting in the Duga, in which the Turkish general described the Montenegrin attacks as displaying a courage he had never before witnessed. They charged the solid Turkish squares, and, grappling the soldiers, attempted to drag them from the ranks. The Montenegrin loss was 800 killed. The ammunition was bad, and the mountaineers often threw their rifles away and attacked with the cold steel. The average advance of the Turks was about a mile a day.

So we waited for the next news from Suleiman with an anxiety in Cettinje not known for a generation. It was supposed that Suleiman would repeat the campaign of Omar Pasha, moving on Cettinje by Rieka, and all the fighting men were called out and the villages on that side evacuated. In this state of painful expectation the news arrived of the passage of the Danube by the Russian army, and the recall of Suleiman and his army for the defense of the principalities. The relief in Cettinje rose to jubilation, and we all returned to our habitual life.

The Prince, freed from this incubus, prepared for the siege of Niksich in good earnest, and, with the diplomatic representatives and the Russian staff, we returned and pitched our camp in the plain, by the side of a cold spring (Studenitzi), which supplied us with an abundance of water, but within cannon shot of the fortress, the shells from which were going over us continually, striking in the plain a few hundred yards beyond us and bursting harmlessly. If the Turks had understood howitzer practice they could have dropped their shells amongst us without fail. The horses could not graze, and the women who came with their husbands' rations could not reach us without passing within gunshot of the outlying trenches of the Turks, and I have seen a file of them come in, each with a huge loaf of bread on her head, and the bullets from the trenches flying around them, but not one hastening her step or paying the least attention to the danger. This is the habit of the Montenegrin woman, who would consider herself disgraced by a display of fear, no matter what the danger. I have seen them go down to the trenches where their husbands were lying for days together, during which time the wives brought the rations every five days, and they always took the opportunity to discuss the affairs of the household deliberately, though under fire, and walk away as unconcernedly.

But our quarters at Studenitzi were not to the taste of the attachs who took no part in the fighting, and we broke camp, and moved off to the edge of the plain, all the time under the fire of the artillery of the fortress. The Montenegrin artillery was brought up, and one by one the little forts which studded the margin of the broad expanse were taken. The first attacked held out till the shells penetrated its thin walls, and then surrendered unconditionally. The garrison, twenty or more Albanian nizams, were brought to the headquarters, and we all turned out to see them. Bagged, half famished, and frightened they were, and, through an Albanian friend who interpreted for me, I offered them coffee. They looked at me with a surprise in their eyes like that of a wild deer taken in a trap, and resigned to its fate, knowing that escape was impossible; and when they had drunk the coffee they asked if we were going to decapitate them now. When I assured them that there was no more question of their decapitation than of mine, and that they were perfectly safe, they broke into a discordant jubilation like that of a children's school let loose; life had nothing more to give them. They had no desire to be sent back to their battalions, and they stayed with us, drawing the pay and rations they should have had, and rarely got, when under their own flag.

The scene our camp presented was one to be found probably under no other sky than that which spread over us in the highlands of Montenegro. The tents of the Prince, the chiefs, and the attachs were pitched in a circle, in the centre of which at night was a huge camp-fire, round which we sat and listened to stories or discussions, or to the Servian epics sung by the Prince's bard, to the accompaniment of the guzla, to which the assembly listened in a silence made impressive by the tears of the hardened old warriors, most of whom knew the pathetic record by heart, and never ceased to warm with patriotic pride at the legends of the heroic defense, the rout of Kossovo, and the fall of the great empire, of which they were the only representatives who had never yielded to the rule of the Turk. Substitute for the rocky ridge which formed the background of the scene the Dardanelles, and the fleet drawn up on the shore before Troy, and you have a parallel such as no other country in our time could give. Both armies retired to their tents at nightfall, and no sentries or outposts were placed on either side at night; and now and then a long-range skirmish went on, or a Montenegrin brave, tired of the monotony of such a war, would go out between the lines and challenge any Mussulman to come out and try his prowess with a Christian. One pope, Milo, a hero of the earlier war, rode up and down before the Turkish outposts, repeating every day his challenge, and at last the Turks hid a squad of sharpshooters where he used to ride, and brought him down with a treacherous volley, then cut off his head and sent it in to the Prince.

Our guns were not heavy enough to cope with those of the fortress, and so we passed the time shelling the redoubts thrown up on the little hillocks around the town, alternating these operations with an occasional assault of one of the nearest of them when the men got impatient for some active movement. Meanwhile we learned that the Russian government was sending us four heavier guns, sixteen and thirty-two bronze rifled breech-loaders, the heaviest we had being ten-pound muzzle-loaders against a battery of field guns, Krupp steel, breech-loading twelve-pounders. The Russian guns were landed on the Dalmatian coast below Budua and carried across the narrow strip of Austrian territory which separated Montenegro from the sea, between two lines of Austrian troops, lest some indiscreet traveler should reveal the violation of neutrality, and were brought to Niksich, about forty miles, on the shoulders of a detachment of Montenegrins over a roadless mountain country, no other conveyance being possible.



CHAPTER XXXII

A JOURNEY INTO THE BERDAS

Pending the arrival of the guns, I explored the more remote and by no traveler hitherto visited section of the Berdas, charged by the Russian Red Cross and the English committees with the distribution of a considerable sum of gold amongst the wounded and families of the killed in that section. With a single perianik (one of the Prince's bodyguard) and my horse boy, who served as interpreter, I set out for the great plains of the northeastern provinces, then menaced by an invasion of a strong division from Kolashin, intended to effect a diversion for the relief of Niksich. Climbing the heights which make a rim like the wall of a crater round the plain of Niksich, I reached a table-land (planina) which rolls away to the frontier. I made my first halt at the monastery of Zupa, situated in a lovely valley where the fertility of the land supports a considerable population, and where the Russians had established a hospital. Nothing could exceed the kindness and humanity of those Russian surgeons. There was one poor patient who had received a ball in the mouth, which lodged in the neck and caused a suppuration, involving an artery, which burst into the wound. The carotid was tied, but the operation failed to stop the hemorrhage, and I found the surgeons relieving each other every quarter of an hour in holding a pledget of lint on the wound, in a determined effort to save the man's life if it were physically possible. The hospital was admirably conducted.

In this beautiful valley I waited several days, wandering amongst the hills. There were flocks of wild pigeons and other game in the vicinity, and one morning of summer weather I took my gun and strolled out alone, having no apprehension of personal danger where there was no fighting population. Approaching a village curiously intent, I discovered an old woman, who, on seeing this unexplained stranger, armed, and with no company of her kin, set up a terrible hullabaloo, shouting, "The Turks! The Turks!" and calling the boys to the defense, and in a jiffy the whole village was up in alarm. I ran as fast as I could in the direction of the monastery, conscious that every boy in the valley had some old pistol, and would not even ask the questions I could not answer before immolating me in the defense of his village. Life is of no account in such circumstances, and the explanation would have been made too late to do me any good, but I never walked out again without my interpreter while in that country.

The object of my excursion was the ancient convent of Dobrilovina, then the advanced post towards Kolashin, the Turkish station in Old Servia, and the point from which all invasions from the east entered Montenegro; and the ride was by far the most interesting of all that I made in the two principalities. From the valley of Zupa we rose on a plateau known as the Lola Planina, on which the watershed is to the north and east and into the Danube. We rode through Drobniak a province the right to which was still theoretically disputed between Turk and Christian, the fruition of peace belonging to the latter; that of war to the former, for it always fights with Montenegro, and is periodically ravaged by the Turks. We were on the watershed between the Adriatic and the Euxine, and the brooks were tributary to the Danube through the Tara. The land is an immense upland, rolling slightly, and the finest grass land I ever saw; it is an immense prairie, with the horizon unbroken, except by the picturesque peak of Dormitor at the north, the summit peak of the mountains of upper Herzegovina, and the centre of the glacial system of the lands between the Adriatic and the great Rascian valley which divides Servia and the lower Danube from Montenegro. The flora was entirely new to me. I rode through a thicket of marguerites so tall that the flowers came up to my face, while the grass came up to my horse's belly. This is a great hayfield, and the people come from far to cut and store the hay for the winter, when they harness the stacks and drag them bodily to their villages on the snow, which sometimes falls, they told me, to the depth of fifteen or more feet. To the east stretched the rolling prairie without a house or a village to the Signavina (desolate land) Planina, solitary as the Sahara, for no man would build where a Turkish raid on this disputed land might sweep him and his into one destruction.

That there had been a great population once on these plains was evident from ancient cemeteries with elaborate monuments of an early but unknown people, of whom they are the only remains. The tombs were rudely worked and decorated in prehistoric manner with devices of war or the chase; one device, which I copied, being of an archer shooting a wild goat, another of a warrior with a long broadsword and large square shield. On some tombs were a crescent and star, the emblem of Constantinople; on a few a cross; but there was no attempt at a letter or other sign of language. The entire absence of any ruins within the distance of our journeys (and by the report of the natives there were none in the country round about) made the presence of these cemeteries an archaeological problem to which I obtained no clue until some time later, on the surrender of Niksich. We then discovered that a large part of the town was formed of houses—huts would be more correct—constructed on sledges, huge runners of timber, into which had been driven stakes, forming the frame of the house. The stakes were filled in with willow branches, and the walls were completed with mud, the whole being roofed with thatch. The forward end of the runners was perforated for a bar, to which oxen could be attached, and the house was evidently to be drawn from place to place, as the herds and flocks found food. Of this nature had probably been the towns or villages to which the cemeteries belonged, and their existence still on the plain of Niksich, where they must have been built without any possibility of removal beyond the limits of the plain (which is only about ten miles in its greatest extent, and bounded by abrupt hills), was a curious evidence of the intensely conservative character of the population which had established itself there at a remote epoch.

The sledge houses at Niksich had never been moved, nor would there have been any object in moving them, for the remotest part of the plain was to be reached in a long hour's walk, and the rocky setting of its grassy luxuriance, rising into higher land all round, by steep ridges, would have shown the builders that where the house was built, there it would stand. On these great planinas there might have been a range far greater, but the presence of the cemeteries, which must have been the result of a considerable duration of residence, proved that the planinas now deserted, save for the summer haymakers, had once been held by a considerable population. I desired to open one of the graves, but the superstition of the people, whom no inducement could prevail on to meddle with the dead, made it impossible to find workers to aid me. I can only conjecture, therefore, from the emblems on the tombs and the rudeness of the reliefs, that they must date from early Christian times, probably the so-called Gallic (really Slavonic) invasions prior to Diocletian; and two or three huge and elaborate roadside crosses, cut from single stones and minutely decorated in relief, found nearer Cettinje, added to the conjectural evidence, for the origin of these was equally unknown to the present inhabitants. We passed caves known immemorially as places of refuge and admirably placed and prepared for defense. There is a great and untouched field there for prehistoric research.

We stopped to pass the night at Shawnik, a village in one of the most picturesque ravines I ever saw. There runs the Bukovitza, a tributary of the Drina, a wild and bold trout stream, abounding also in grayling, the trout being unaccustomed to the fly, as they are in most of the streams hereabout. Shawnik lies in the gate to the open country, the gateposts being two huge bastions of rock from which a few riflemen could defy an army until they found a way around through the rough country of Voinik, the chain which lay between us and Niksich. I slept at the house of an Albanian tailor (all the tailors in Montenegro and the Berdas are Albanians) and was made comfortable. We found the voivode of the province, Peiovich, at Aluga, with his headquarters in the schoolhouse, and keeping a lookout for the Turks, who menaced an invasion from Kolashin, a band of them having just attempted to pass the Tara, which bounds the plain on the north, but being driven back with loss. I found Aluga a noble subalpine country, a rolling plateau with here and there a little lake; to the northwest the grand mass of Dormitor, and to the northeast the range of the highlands which border the valleys of Old Servia, while to the east and south the horizon was like that of the sea, an undulating plain rolling far away out of the range of vision. Scattered houses dotted the plain of Aluga, and the children came to stare, and brought us, with the shyness of wild deer, little baskets of strawberries, which in some places in the fir forests almost reddened the ground, and, having pushed the offerings in at the door, ran like wild creatures, as if to escape being noticed. Huge haystacks dotted the plain, and the population seemed prosperous. We pushed on to the frontier post at Dobrilovina through glades of fir-trees with pasture intervening, as the soil was rocky or fertile, and reached the margin of the Tara late in the afternoon, a good day's ride from Aluga.

The Tara has cut itself a caon like those of the Yellowstone, and on a little space of alluvial land at the bottom lies the convent, a building of the Servian Empire, curiously spared by the Turkish invasions. We descended 2500 feet, measured by my aneroid, to the flat, where the monks made us most welcome. We walked along the river, a rapid and shallow stream filled with trout, which refused to take any lure I could show them,—and the monks said that they ate only the crayfish which abounded in the river.

We went to sleep, to be awakened at midnight by the scouts who came in to tell us that the Turks were out from Kolashin, and that some thousands of Albanians of the Rascian country were raiding in advance, and had already thrown their left far beyond us. Had they known we were there, we might have been taken in a trap from which only fleet fugitives would have escaped. With the dawn we were in our saddles again, and, by the urgent advice of Peiovich, I took the back track, while the battalion threw itself across the country to skirmish, and retard the advance of the Turks while reinforcements could be brought up. "Ride hard," said the voivode, "and keep ahead of the Albanians, for when it comes to fighting we shall probably have to disperse and every man provide for himself, and you do not know the country. Tell the Prince to hurry up reinforcements." I lunched in the schoolhouse of Aluga, and pushed on for Bukowitza and Shawnik, where the invasion would be stopped with certainty. Half way to Bukowitza there burst on us a terrific thunderstorm, with torrents of rain. One bolt struck so near us that the concussion knocked my perianik down, and my horse jumped up on all fours as I never saw a horse do before, but neither was touched by the lightning, and we arrived at the first house of Bukowitza drenched and tired, having knocked the two days' march into one.

The owner of the house at which we asked for shelter said: "What I have you are welcome to, but I have only two rooms, that in which the family sleeps, and the kitchen. You are welcome to the bedroom, but I fear there are too many fleas for you to sleep, and you had better stay in the kitchen." I accepted the kitchen, and after a supper of hot maize bread and trout fresh caught from the nearest brook, the whole flooded with cream, I spread my cork mattress on a long bench which served as chairs for the household, and, covering myself with my waterproof, the only bedding attainable, I went to sleep. I was awakened by the sound of something falling on the waterproof, which I took to be bits of plaster from overhead, but, as it persisted, I struck a light and discovered that it was caused by bugs which, not finding a direct way to me from their nests in the wall, had climbed up and dropped from the ceiling down on me. What with the insects and the chance of being aroused at dawn by an attack of the raiding Albanians, I did not sleep again, and was up at dawn preparing to continue the journey to Shawnik, where alone we could count on being safe from the swarms of bashi-bazouks, whose movements we could already follow in the air by the smoke ascending from house and haystack over the plains we had traversed the day before.

The day had broken fine, and after stopping long enough to make a sketch of the house where I had passed the night, destined like all others in the open country to be burned in the course of the day, I pushed on to the fastness of Shawnik. The advance of the Turks was practically unopposed, for there was only a battalion of Montenegrins against thousands of irregulars and a strong division of regulars, and the Prince, never much troubled about the odds except where he was personally responsible, had not sent a man of the reinforcements which Peiovich had urgently begged for by courier after courier, so he fell back skirmishing until Socica from Piva joined him, when he made a stand.

For several days the two armies watched each other, each waiting for the offensive of the other, until one morning found the plain covered with a fog so dense that the combatants could not see each other one hundred yards away, when the Montenegrins made an attack so furious that the Turks retreated and took refuge across the Tara and withdrew to Kolashin, abandoning the movement and the attempt to relieve Niksich. But the beautiful schoolhouse at Aluga and all the houses and churches on the planina and at Bukowitza, the haystacks which had so picturesquely dotted the plain, and which were to have furnished the winter subsistence of all the flocks of the region, were ashes.

The night at Shawnik had proved as sleepless from fleas as that of Bukowitza from bugs, and, what with the fatigue of the race against time and the lack of any sleep for forty-eight hours, the next day found me laboring under an attack of illness which left me absolutely helpless, with a raging headache and cholera morbus. I dragged myself out into the sun and ordered my horse boy to bring me a bucket of water as hot as I could bear my feet in, and then made him keep it hot with ashes until my feet were almost parboiled, when the headache gradually subsided, leaving me a wilted, helpless being, hardly able to sit in the saddle. I waited another day to recruit, and hoping to hear from Peiovich the result of the invasion; but, hearing that the deadlock might last for days, I returned to Niksich and found the siege still going on as if it were the work of the generation.



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE TAKING OF NIKSICH

To the Prince the siege of Niksich was like a game of chess played by cable, a move a day. But even this brought progress, and, when we had taken the outlying blockhouses, one by one, and there remained only the citadel, a flimsy fortress, mainly, I should judge, the work of the Servian kings, all that remained to accomplish was the bombardment of its walls, which became a sort of spectacle, to which we went day after day to watch the effect of the fire, as we should have done with a game of skittles. I climbed up on the top of a neighboring mountain, and, with my field-glass, inspected the town. Women went and came with their water-pitchers on their heads, moving in serene tranquillity, without quickening a step, and the life of the place seemed absolutely undisturbed by the danger, as if shells did not burst. Now and then one of the houses caught fire and varied the show; the Turkish return fire was mainly directed at the batteries where the great Russian guns were posted, and the Montenegrins used to sit on the rocks around, utterly heedless of the Turkish fire, despising cover. Finally a shell fell and exploded in the midst of a group of men, and, for the time, cover was made compulsory by order of the Prince. But the rank and file grew impatient, and demanded an attack with such insistence that the Prince was obliged to move. There were two steep ridges to the west of the city, crowned by strong stone breastworks and held by considerable detachments of regulars, being positions of supreme importance, as they commanded the redoubts on that side from a distance of 300 to 500 yards. The Prince gave the assault of one to a battalion of Montenegrins, and the other to the Herzegovinian auxiliaries.

There was in our camp a young German officer who had been under a shadow, and had been sent away to retrieve his reputation for courage. He came to Montenegro to earn a decoration, and begged the Prince to let him go with the Montenegrin battalion. At the foot of each ridge was an outwork which had first to be taken by assault, from across the open, and which was taken in the early twilight, the Turks seeking refuge in the redoubt above. The Montenegrin force reversed the works they had taken, and a desultory rifle fire went on till it was too dark to see the sights of the rifles. We, the spectators, were assigned posts to see the spectacle as at the theatre, and went to them just after sundown. The straggling fire of the early twilight stopped, and there was an unbroken silence and immobility which lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and until everything had become vague and indefinable in the deepening twilight, when we heard the signal, given by a trumpet call, and instantly the steep sides of the two ridges were crawling with gray shadows, and a terrific fire burst out from the redoubts at the top, lasting for hardly ten minutes, when it as suddenly ceased; and then, after a brief pause, the Montenegrin trumpet sounded from the summit of their ridge to tell that the work was done. We trooped back to our tents and to supper, and presently came in our little German friend, unharmed and exultant. His account was graphic. The Montenegrins had taken the outwork, working up on hand and knee, crawling and firing from such cover as they could find until the Turks broke and escaped to the summit, and the Montenegrins lay close behind the wall they had taken. When the trumpet sounded they threw their rifles down, drew their sword bayonets, and made a rush with the naked steel. The fire broke out from the redoubt above, said our little German, with a roar that was absolutely appalling; it was as if the sky were woven with whistling missiles, and but for very shame, seeing the rage of combat in the men around him, he would have lain down in overmastering panic. But no man halted, and the race between the two battalions was won by the Montenegrins only by a minute, and they poured over the wall of the redoubts, the Turks who could escape going out at the rear as their assailants poured in. When it comes to this final charge, the Montenegrin always leaves his gun behind and trusts only to the cold steel.

The next morning a flag of truce came to ask for terms, and the town surrendered on condition of the garrison going out with their arms and their private property. We went out to see them defile past the Prince and his staff. The poor fellows were in rags, and the bundles they carried on their backs contained everything they had in the world. Wives and children in numbers followed or preceded, and to our attempts to show them little kindnesses they shrank from us as if we had been wolves, the children generally howling with fear when we offered them a biscuit or a coin. One of our battalions escorted them through the narrows of the Duga, and, when they reached the wild and bosky gorge which makes its strongest position, the women stopped in a paralysis of panic, asking if this was the place where they were to be butchered, so completely had the Turkish authorities impressed on them the fiction of infallible slaughter for all who fell into the hands of the Montenegrins. The Prince gave the inhabitants four days to choose whether they would stay and become his subjects or take all their possessions and go to Albania. The most had decided to stay, when word was sent them from Spuz that all who accepted the protection of the Prince would be expelled and have all their property confiscated when the Turks returned, and many were frightened into revocation of their submission. Some were as irreconcilable as wolves, and would not endure conversation with us. I found a little fellow, about five or six, pasturing a lamb in the outskirts of the town, and tried, with the aid of the interpreter, to enter into conversation with him, but to no effect. He repelled every advance, and, when I offered him a piastre, he refused it with a savage dignity, saying that he had money of his own and did not want mine.

We took an immense booty in provisions, artillery (nineteen guns), tents, and war material, left by Suleiman in the expectation of returning after he had made the conquest of Montenegro. Ammunition there was none, for the artillery had been supplied with old muzzle-loading pistol and other cartridges broken up for the last weeks of the siege. And so ended the contest of four hundred years.

The easy terms accorded by the Prince to the garrison of Niksich brought their compensation a little later, when, the liberated garrison being besieged anew in the impregnable fortress of Spizza dominating the road from Dalmatia to Antivari, they gave in without a serious defense, satisfied with the honors of war. It was clear, from the testimony I was able to collect from Turkish deserters and prisoners, that the obstinate defense of the garrisons under siege was oftener due to the desperation inspired by the assurance of the Turkish authorities themselves, that no quarter would be given to those who surrendered, than to the bellicose ardor. A captain of the Turkish nizams, who had commanded one of the little fortresses beyond Niksich, and who surrendered to Socica when he knew that his tower was undermined and would be blown up in a minute if he did not surrender, declined to be released, as he knew that, whatever might happen to his men, he would be shot for surrendering, and no account taken of the necessity of saving the life of his men, to say nothing of his own. The method of Socica in attacking those towers, which were of stone, without any artillery, was to construct a wooden tower on wheels, strong enough to resist rifle balls, and which, moved by the men inside, approached the fortress, till actually in contact, when a mine was put under the wall and the garrison was summoned to surrender.

Our Albanian captain preferred the climate of Cettinje to that of Podgoritza, and there I made his acquaintance. He had not received a penny of his pay for forty months, and was in rags and shoeless in the depth of winter, when I knew him. I bought him some shoes and second-hand clothes, and interested the Prince in his case, so that finally he was given a place on the staff and regular pay. The gratitude of the poor fellow was embarrassing. He begged me to take him as a body servant, declaring himself ready to go with me to the world's end, and I could hardly make him understand that a servant would be a burden to me which I could not afford. He said to one of the Montenegrin officers, "When I say my prayers for myself I always ask God to be good to that English gentleman." As with most of the men of his race whom I have made the acquaintance of, his native faculties were of a high order. The Albanians are quick, ingenious, and industrious, and are the best workmen in the finer industrial arts of the Balkans, gold and silver workers of remarkable skill, dividing the blacksmithing with the gypsy, but the best and indeed the only armorers of that world. We had a number of them in the camp at Niksich, refugees from the tribes on our frontier, and I found them most interesting companions, generally speaking Italian and Serb as well as their own dialects. Their conservatism is something almost inexplicable. A friend who had campaigned with them told me that when they sacked a village their first quest was always for old iron, which they valued more than gold and silver, an estimation which can only be the heredity of an age when iron was the article of the highest utility, for now it is easy of acquisition everywhere about their country. They reckon their ancestry from the mother, and when my Cretan cavass, Hadji Houssein, spoke of his home, it was always as his "mother's house."

Niksich settled under Montenegrin rule, and order established, the Prince moved his headquarters to Bilek, a fortress which commanded the roads from Ragusa to the interior of Herzegovina, and whence he could dominate all the southern sections of that province, protecting his frontier. There was, as usual, no road for wheels, only a rough bridle-path, and the mobility of the Montenegrins under those conditions was remarkable. They carried the thirty-two-pound breech-loaders on fir poles run through the guns and supported on the men's shoulders, faster than our horses could walk, and the artillery rapidly distanced the staff and corps diplomatique, not even a rear guard remaining with us. In company with one of the aides I rode on under the impression that headquarters were behind us, until we got lost in the labyrinth of paths running about the forest, and we lay down under a tree to rest and wait for the staff to overtake us. Here one of the perianiks found us and brought us to the Prince, who had gone ahead on a blind road, with half a dozen perianiks, two or three sirdars, and the diplomats. He had tried to show his knowledge of the country and lost his way; so, coming to a pretty dell which took his fancy, he ordered a halt and preparations to pass the night, and there we found him.

We had no tents; the rendezvous for the night had been at Tupani, several miles from where we were, and the division commanders were with the men and had no communication with us. We had eaten an early breakfast, and had brought no food; the only blankets were those of the Prince. The perianiks gathered wood and made a fire, round which we gathered, for the night set in sharp, it being the middle of September in a high mountain country. One of the men had taken the precaution to put two or three pieces of bread in his haversack before starting, and this was divided between us, and I made my supper on this and some wild plums I found growing there. Later the men went out to forage and found a farmhouse, where they got straw and milk, with a little sheep's-milk cheese. The proprietress, aroused by the invasion, came down on us in a veritable visitation, furious at our burning her wood. She abused the Prince and all the company in the most insulting terms, and was finally placated only by a liberal compensation for her wood. I spread my bundle of straw under the wild plum tree, and, covered by my ulster, tempted sleep. I dozed until the ants found me out, when, unable to lie quiet under the formication, I got up and passed hours walking up and down till I was so tired that I almost fell asleep walking; then I lay down again and slept for an hour, but the cold and the ants awoke me again, and I spent the rest of the night by the camp-fire. Meanwhile the army collected at Tupani knew nothing of the Prince, and, with the early dawn, patrols were sent off in every direction to beat up the country in search of him. Had the Turks been on the lookout they might have gobbled up the Prince and his diplomats without difficulty. Beaching the general rendezvous, I decided that a more active occupation than following the tactics of the Prince would suit me better, and I turned my horse's head towards Niksich again. Another tedious siege like that of Niksich was not to my taste, and I decided to explore the remoter provinces, and if possible go to Wassoivich, the only corner of the great Dushanic empire into which the Turk had never penetrated even for a raid, where, under the rugged peaks of the Kutchi Kom, survived the best representatives of ancient custom and life.



CHAPTER XXXIV

MORATSHA

Niksich was full of smallpox and fever, and, as there was a great abundance of tents captured with the city, I took one, with an extra baggage-horse and his leader, and started for Moratsha. The wide plain into which we entered after leaving the hills above Niksich was a great pasture land, mottled as I never saw land before with mushrooms. The abundance was extraordinary, but nothing would induce a Montenegrin to eat one. We halted for our first night on the edge of a magnificent natural meadow, where a shepherd had built his hut and was feeding his flocks, and we took advantage of his presence to enjoy some security against the wolves, pitching our tent in a little grove close to him and picketing our horses between the tent and his hut. He and his sons were on guard by turns all night, and the howling of the tantalized wolves came clearly to us at times with, at long intervals, the reports of the guns which were fired to keep them at a distance. They were so near at one time that I got up and fired my fowling-piece out of the tent, and we kept lights burning all night to prevent them from attacking our horses. In the course of the night a thunderstorm came up, and, as we had pitched the tent in a hollow to secure freedom from stones in our beds, the rain, washed out our tent-pegs, and the tent came down on us in our sleep. In the morning I sent to the shepherd for a lamb for breakfast for the men, and he sent us what I took for a full-grown sheep, so large and fat was it, and I sent it back, asking for a lamb. He replied that it was a spring lamb, and the smallest he had. The price of it was about two shillings, and for another he offered to dress it for us.

From there we sent back the tent, and the following night we slept at Velje Duboko, at the bottom of one of the ravines which make the surprises of traveling in that country so great. You proceed along a rolling plain with no suspicion of the caon before you, and suddenly find yourself on the verge of a cliff, looking down into a valley hundreds of feet deep. Duboko lay by the river's margin fifteen hundred feet below us, to be reached only by a winding journey of an hour, though the shepherds carried on conversation from cliff to cliff above. Here a momentary surprise by the Turkish bands has now and then been possible, but never an occupation of the country. The picturesqueness of the valley of the Duboko above the village can be rarely surpassed by wild landscape, and the whole section, the centre of which is the stronghold of Moratsha, is of a most interesting character, utterly unlike the Czernagora proper.

At the convent of Moratsha I found civilization and comfort. The hegumenos, a Dalmatian by birth, but a patriot of the first quality, and a very militant Christian, made me most welcome. I had some money from the English and Russian committees to distribute amongst the needy wounded and the families of the killed, and the gratitude of the nave hearts was touching to a degree I never saw in richer countries. But what most surprised them was that some of it came from the English. "Why, English!" exclaimed one old woman, as she started back when told that I was English; "they are a kind of Turk." All the world there thought only of the English as the allies of the Turks, but the hospitality they felt, and could show only in trifles, was unbounded. I had brought with me a battle-axe I had found in the stores of Niksich and taken as my part of the booty, but had not noticed that it had never been sharpened, so that it was useless for cutting. One of the men at the convent took it, and with a common whetstone (for there was nothing in the nature of a grindstone in the place) brought it to razor edge,—a job which a carpenter alone can appreciate; and, when I tried to give him something for it, he put his hands behind him and then ran out of sight. A little fellow, not over four years old, stumbled upstairs to my room to bring me an ear of green maize, the greatest delicacy they know, and another ran to me in the road to offer me a huge and fine potato he was nursing with pride. The walnuts were just then eatable, and one of the men brought me a quantity in his closed hands so that I should not see what he had, and, emptying them into my hands, ran away with all speed lest I should give him something in return. They had been carefully cracked and removed from the shells, as the most delicate attention he could show me.

The convent is an old-time stronghold, but, dominated on three sides by hills which look down into its quadrangle, it would be untenable to rifle fire. It was founded by Stefan Nemanides, son of Bolkan, Prince of the Zeta (a term which comprised all Montenegro and the Berdas), and eldest son of Stefan, Emperor of Servia. The Romanesque church, which occupies the centre of the quadrangle, was built about A.D. 1250, but, having been burnt out by the Turks, it was restored in 1400, the walls being uninjured, and it has never been since damaged; and the frescoes in the chapel, which are older than those in the church, are dated 1420. There are some in the church painted later by a monk from Mount Athos, but decidedly inferior to those in the little chapel.

I was hardly in shelter at the convent when the rains set in, and for nearly two weeks I was weather-bound, for in that wild country, with no roads but the tracks the horses wear in the ground, traveling in the mud of rainy weather is out of the question. In a lull of actual downpour we made an excursion to Kolashin, four hours away, passing through the scene of the defeat of Mehemet Ali Pasha. The hegumenos, who commanded the half battalion of the monastery, showed me the line of the fighting, and described the battle, and certainly it was one of the most extraordinary battles even in the history of this fighting people.

The Turks came from Kolashin by a road which debouches into the valley by a steep descent of about five hundred feet, and they had crowned the heights and planted their battery before the clans could gather, since these had been scattered along a line of thirty or forty miles, uncertain what point would be attacked. Voivode Vucovich, hereditary chief of the Wassoivich, with half a battalion of his own people, was watching and following the Turks from a distance, and, when he saw that the movement was intended for the convent, he sent runners to Peiovich in Drobniak and warned the convent, where was a half battalion of local forces. The regulars formed on the ridge, intrenched themselves, and sent the irregulars, Albanians of the tribe of the Mirdites, down to lead the attack. As soon as these were well entangled in the intricacies of the valley, seeing only the half battalion of Moratsha posted in front of them, Vucovich led an attack down the slope in their rear, getting between them and the regulars, and the Moratshani made a sortie from the convent, which is inclosed by a strong wall, and attacked in front. The Albanians fought desperately for a short time, but, attacked on both sides, though by forces much inferior in the aggregate to their own, they finally broke in panic. A large body ran into a ravine, which proved a cul de sac, for the end up which they hoped to escape was so precipitous that few escaped the infuriated Montenegrins following them, who, when the fight was over, counted eleven hundred dead. The rest of the Albanians continued their flight to Kolashin, the panic involving the regulars, who insisted on returning, and, in spite of all remonstrances of the officers, went back.

The hegumenos, Mitrofan Banovich, whose name deserves record as well as any I heard of in this land of heroes, introduced to me the captain of the Moratsha battalion, who had taken part in the fight. He had lost his son in it, and of his four hundred men twenty-five had been killed and forty put hors de combat from wounds which disabled them from fighting. The Wassoivich had exhausted their ammunition and the unwounded of the Moratshani were only enough to carry away the wounded; had the Turkish regulars maintained the attack, there could have been no further resistance, the way would have been open to take the Montenegrins about Danilograd in the rear, and Suleiman would have had a clear course.

The captain told me of one brave Albanian who had fallen wounded from his horse and taken shelter in a crevice of the rocks, and who had killed two Montenegrins and wounded a third before he was disposed of by one of them getting behind him and shooting him through a crevice in the sheltering rocks. The manner of his death and that of those of his assailants illustrate the war manners of the Montenegrins so completely that I was interested in the case more than in other heroic details of the fight. The Montenegrin makes a question of amour propre in attacking his enemies face to face and by preference with the cold steel. Enemies who fall in the general mle by rifle-shot he never considers his "heads;" he claims only those he has killed in hand-to-hand combat. This Albanian was the standard-bearer of his clan, i.e. the hereditary chieftain, and to kill him in hand-to-hand combat was the ambition of the three who attacked him in succession, the shooting from behind being only a matter of necessity.

I remembered at that moment a correspondence I had had years before with Virchow, on the Pelasgi, and their probable relation with the Albanians, whom he regarded as the descendants of the Pelasgi; and, thinking of his collection of skulls, I asked the captain if he knew the spot where the body of the Albanian lay, and if the bones were still there, and when he assured me that they were where he fell, I offered him two florins to bring me the skull, which he did. It was of a man in the prime of life, with the sutures scarcely closed, and only two teeth lacking, and none unsound, and I sent it on to the great craniologist, who replied with warm thanks. The skull, he said, was the finest for intellectual development in his collection, and he read a paper on it before the Imperial German Academy. He was so impressed by its character that he was disposed to consider it as an exceptional skull, and wrote to one of the Austrian officers in Montenegro to ask him to make an effort to send some more, and these, though not, like that of the standard-bearer, of unquestionably pure Albanian stock,—for the aristocracy never intermarry with any other blood than that of their class and race,—all possessed the same intellectual characteristics, justifying him in placing the Albanian at the head of the races of Europe for intellectual capacity.

We reconnoitred Kolashin, and found it an almost open fortress, which was commanded by hills around, and so near that it could be made untenable by rifle fire, which could have been poured in from both sides of the river that ran by it, which, though then a swollen torrent, was under ordinary conditions fordable anywhere. The Turks seemed indisposed to provoke an exchange of shots, and did not trouble us, though we went within easy rifle-shot inspecting the works through my field-glass, and, before leaving, took our luncheon in full sight of the garrison, who were working on some trenches intended for protection from a coup de main from the river. I made a sketch of the fortress, and we withdrew tranquilly. In fact, the Turkish garrisons, so far as my own experience went, were never disposed to begin a fight, and if not molested they never annoyed us by firing on us. The poor fellows only wanted to be left alone. They were, when prisoners, the most amiable people possible, and at one time I saw many in Cettinje, prisoners taken in the fights about Podgoritza, enjoying the freedom of the place and making themselves useful to the women, bringing wood and water, and as inoffensive as children. Many of them, probably young men without domestic ties, refused to return when the treaty of peace was signed, but, with a docility which was as remarkable as their obedience under the atrocious treatment of their own government, only asked for their bread and toleration. I have seen in Cettinje, when the men were all on the frontier fighting, Turkish prisoners enough to take possession of the place if they had been disposed to rise and make a fight with sticks and stones. This was one of the most touching phases of that curious war, a warfare such as the world will hardly see again.

The day after our trip to Kolashin the rain set in again, and we passed nearly a fortnight more at the convent before the weather broke and I was able to set out, taking with me a gang of men to make the roads passable for my horse, so much had the rains wrought havoc with the face of the land. The flooded state of the country and unfordable rivers forbade the trip to Wassoivich, and I was obliged, to my great regret, to relinquish it and to go back to Cettinje, having lost nearly three weeks in the rain at Moratsha. Returning by a different route from that by which I came, I crossed the Duboko at a point much lower down than that of my first striking it, where it makes the most magnificent trout stream I have ever seen. The trout from it feed the Moratsha and the Lake of Scutari. In the Duboko they are caught, according to the statement of a native of the district, as heavy as forty pounds; and Mr. Green, the English consul at Scutari, told me that they were sometimes caught much larger in the lake. There were plenty in the Zeta at Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince's tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid. I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of dynamite, which rarely killed, but only stunned, the larger fish, of which few were retrieved even when stunned or killed. I one day remonstrated indignantly with the Prince for this barbarous butchery, and told him that if he permitted his men to carry it on his son would reign in a fishless country, and he promised to forbid it; but the matter passed from his memory in a day. The Duboko was a safe nursery for the fry, for it was such a torrent that dynamite was useless, since it would have been impossible to retrieve a fish if killed.

Our road lay through the district of Rovtcha, which is considered the poorest for the agriculturist in all the Berdas. It is very hilly, and the rock is, where we passed, a rotten slate which the rains and the torrents cut away rapidly, carrying the alluvium down to the plains and Lake of Scutari. Digging and bridging, we reached, early in the afternoon, the village of Gornje-Rovtcha, and were then informed that it would be impossible to reach another habitation that day, and that the road passed through an immense forest infested by wolves, in which we should be compelled to sleep if we held on. This I had no desire to try, remembering our experience with the shepherds on the first night out from Niksich. So we passed the hours to the dark in shooting at a mark, and went to bed early. The house which was selected to be honored by my repose, the best in the village, was of one room, from which the animals were excluded, with the usual floor of beaten earth. A huge bedstead of small fir poles, the only important piece of furniture in it, was assigned to me, and the family—all women and children—spread their rugs on the ground. After eating a supper brought from the convent, and some potatoes, the only provision, except a little coarse maize bread which the house afforded, we went to bed. The bedstead was abundantly provided with straw, but nought beside, and the fleas routed me from my first sleep and compelled me to evacuate the premises. I took my mattress and went out where my pony was picketed, and, spreading it in his lee, to break the cold north wind fresh from the mountain, I tried to sleep.

The poor horse had supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day's walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could have made myself, but the only effect of which was to break my doze as soon as begun, until I lost my patience with him, and gave him a sound box on the ear, when he turned his head from me, and lay down again. It made my heart ache to be unkind to him, for he was the gentlest and most serviceable friend I had in Montenegro, but I could get nothing to give him if I had paid a guinea the pound for it, and he would not let me sleep. The intelligent brute felt what language could not tell him, and ceased his complaint, though the blow I gave him would hardly have killed a gad-fly on his hair; but it sufficed, and gave me more discomfort than him, for I did not cease to reproach myself for the ungrateful return for his fidelity. But I slept no more, and watched the stars in their courses till the dawn.

A glass of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia. The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw—straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth. Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the principality. Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded one with its glare in the sunlight. Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw. In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry canal, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time. It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.

We reached the convent too late to get to Danilograd that night, considering the condition of the roads, and I asked for shelter for the night. Here, for the first time in my experience with Orthodox convents, lodgings were refused me by the old hegumenos, and I instantly ordered the horses to be loaded again, without attempting to soften his surliness. A few minutes' talk with the captain who was my escort showed him that I was a person too much in favor with the Prince to be treated with such derision, and he came to offer me a place to spread my mattress on a balcony exposed to the south wind and the rain; then, having begun to relent, he went further, and offered me a room, which I refused, and finally his own bed; but even that did not break my inflexible resentment. When he became pathetic in his repentance, however, I accepted a balcony whence I could look down on the fortress of Spuz, within easy range of its sleeping batteries; and then he offered me a supper, which I accepted, and we made peace. In the morning he had become humanized, and he gave me breakfast and showed me the body of St. Stephen, which is kept here in great reverence (not the proto-martyr, but a Montenegrin of the same name). The saint lay in state in a magnificent coffin, as if embalmed, and in his hand was an old and time-yellowed embroidered handkerchief which looked as if it might have been there a century or two. Remembering a dear friend in the Orthodox church to whom the relics of its saints were precious, I asked the hegumenos to sell me this handkerchief. He replied that he dared not take it, but if I had the courage to do so he would not prevent me, so I took the relic and put a twenty franc piece in the treasury of the convent, and went my way.