The Autobiography of a Journalist Volume II Part 4

THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE

To me Russie's death was a crus.h.i.+ng disaster. The care and constant preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an introduction to the manager of the "Times," and offered to pay my expenses should the "Times" not accept my letters. I knew so well the condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the "Times" now served me as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same time I arranged to send letters to the New York "Herald," also as a volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.

Arriving at Trieste in August, 1875, I found that a committee was at work sending arms and ammunition, and, following the coast down, I found other committees at work at Zara and elsewhere, under Austrian auspices, without any attention being paid to their action by the Imperial authorities. At Ragusa I found the headquarters of the agitation, there under the direction of the captain of the port, Kovachevich, a zealous Slavonic patriot. The movement was evidently regarded benevolently by the Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, and the insurgents came openly into the city, and returned again to their fighting with fresh supplies of ammunition and provisions. I pushed on to the Bocche di Cattaro, and at Castel Nuovo found the insurgents coming and going freely, and at Sutorina, in the corner of Herzegovina, which comes to the Gulf of Cattaro, their depot and manufactory of cartridges.

The information to be obtained there was abundant, if not always absolutely trustworthy; but on the whole I found the only fault of that which I got from the insurgents was its exaggeration, while what I got from the Turkish consul-general at Ragusa was simple fabrication. Volunteers fully armed went by every steamer, and when they had enough of campaigning they went to Castel Nuovo and refreshed themselves, and returned, quite regardless of the Austrian regulations. I found that the insurrection was spreading through all the mountain section of Herzegovina and along the border of Montenegro, and it was said that strong detachments of Montenegrins were aiding in the operations. The Prince of Montenegro had opposed the insurrection in the early stages of it, and had even sent old Peko Pavlovich to arrest the Herzegovinian leader, Ljubibratich, and carry him to Ragusa, where he left him under Austrian authority, to return freely as soon as his band had reunited. But as, according to the general Slav opinion, there was nothing important to be done without Montenegro, I pushed on to Cettinje to see with my own eyes what there was to see.

The little world about Cettinje has changed so much since this my first visit there, and was so little known then by the outer world, that my experiences there will be to the present day like those which one might have in a perished social organization. The only access to the capital of the princ.i.p.ality was by a zigzag bridle-path up from Cattaro to a height of 4500 feet above the sea,--a hard, rough road, more easily traveled on foot than in the saddle, and so I traveled it, in the company of a Scotch cavalry officer intending to volunteer.

Pa.s.sing the rocky ridge along which ran the boundary between freedom and Austria, one descended by another precipitous path into the valley of Njegush, the birthplace of the family of the Prince, a circular amphitheatre of rocks, a narrow ridge here and there holding still a little earth on which the people raised a few stalks of maize or a few potatoes, a few square yards of wheat, or a strip of poor gra.s.s for the sheep or goats. Every tiny field was terraced against the wash of the rains so that the soil should not be carried away, for the geological formation of this part of the princ.i.p.ality, Montenegro proper, is a porous rock, which allows water to filter through it, and which is even so fissured that no stream will form, and the drainage is through the rocks or in _katavothra_ which gush out in mysterious fountains in the Gulf of Cattaro or into the Lake of Scutari.

Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor, with two or three--of which one was the house of the Petrovich family--of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners pa.s.sing through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the "Times" apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses were to be hired, a senator of the princ.i.p.ality who had _accidentally_ come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within the gates.

The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pa.s.s over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery.

Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the princ.i.p.al was the "palace," a residence which in another country would have been a poor gentleman's country house. Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a "Times"

correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday occurrence. No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as impa.s.sive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there, no one seemed at all curious about our business. This was the manner of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information.

We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer any questions other than evasively. And it was only after a long acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin. The generations of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to mislead,--four hundred years of a national existence of combat and ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia,--had developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman. I was, however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where he heard appeals of all kinds, from pet.i.tions for help to the last recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which every Montenegrin was ent.i.tled, and without which none submitted to an unfavorable judgment.

The moment was critical, for communications had been pa.s.sing between Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against the Sultan, for which the entire population of the princ.i.p.ality was impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the alliance. The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and would be nerveless. The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain the people from going in limited numbers, and in an un.o.btrusive way, into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem, the Turkish government had never terminated the _de jure_ state of war with the princ.i.p.ality, or acknowledged its independence, and the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably, as Troy was for ten years. As to operations in Herzegovina, small bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the frontier when they had had a brush, but all _sub rosa_.

The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved condition of all the population around. He is a man of large mould, of a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preeminence amongst his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to large men, and a hearty _bonhomie_ which with that simple people was a bond to the most pa.s.sionate devotion. He is quick-witted and diplomatic, with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head of a family amongst them. He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the princ.i.p.ality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable. In all but military abilities he had grown curiously to the measure of his place, and his diplomatic abilities more than compensated for the want of the military. And what was most singular was that his early education in Paris had not spoiled the Montenegrin in him.

Probably much of this conserved character was due to the Princess, an admirable woman, who deserves a place amongst the world's remarkable female sovereigns; for her energy, patriotism, and instinct of the obligations of the crisis were more remarkable than anything else connected with the house of Njegush. Beautiful even at the period in which I first saw her, gifted with a tact and sympathetic manner quite regal in their reach, she held her husband up to action and decision when his own nerves were shaken. A Montenegrin of voivode stock, the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been the right-hand man of Mirko, the father of the Prince, the commander-in-chief of the previous reign, she had the true Amazonian temper, and would not have hesitated to take the field had the courage of her husband failed him; though, in tranquil times, she was a true Slavonic woman, domestic, affectionate in her family, and effacing herself before her husband. I remember that the Prince told me that, after the splendid victory of Vucidol, he sent two couriers to announce to the Princess at Cettinje the news of the victory, and the first question she asked of them was, "Did the Prince show courage?"

and when they replied, with a little Montenegrin craft, that they had had to hold him by force to keep him from plunging into the melee, she gave them each a half ducat. "And," said the Prince, "if they had said that I had led the charge, she would have given them a whole ducat."

But, with all his civic virtues, the Prince was the very type of a despotic ruler. The word "const.i.tution" was his bugbear, and he would not abate one particular of his absolute power, or tolerate the slightest deflection of his authority in his family, any more than in the princ.i.p.ality. His will was the law, and though, in the details of administration, the voivodes and the "ministers" were trusted, nothing could be decided without his personal supervision, nor was any decision of a tribunal settled without an appeal to him in person.

One day, as I sat with him under the Tree of Judgment, we saw in the distance a number of the common people approaching the tree. "Now,"

said he, "you will see a curious thing. This is a case of appeal from the decision of the head men of a village on which there had been quartered more of the Herzegovinian refugees in proportion to their population than they thought they should support, so that they sought relief by sending a part of the refugees to a neighboring village which had not had what they considered its due charge. The villagers of the second village appeal from this overcharge, alleging that their means do not permit them to receive more than they actually have." The rival deputations approached the tree, cap in hand, and, on the Prince giving the order to open the case, it was stated through the head men as the Prince had summarized it. The Prince heard both cases and then asked the head man of the lesser village if they had done as much as they could do in the way of relief, and the head man explained that their village was small and poor (which was quite unnecessary to say of a Montenegrin village), and they could not support more refugees; whereupon the Prince, addressing himself to the deputation of the larger village, repeated to them the parable of the widow and her mite, and, a.s.suring them that the little village had done its best, as the widow did, and they must be content, dismissed the case, and without a word of complaint the two deputations went off together, discussing with each other in the most friendly manner; and the discontent, so far as we could see, was at an end.

But if this patriarchal form of government was interesting, the character of the people under it was still more so, and it was to me a great pleasure and privilege to be enabled to study, as I did for the three years of the insurrection and war, a nation in the earliest stage of true civilization, corresponding as nearly as we can reconstruct ethnology to that of the Greeks in the time of the Trojan war, arms but not men being changed. The honesty and civic discipline were perfect, hospitality limited only by the ability to give it, and the courage and military discipline absolutely unquestioning. If the Prince ordered a position to be stormed, no man would return from the attack till the bugle sounded the recall. I remember charges made during the war in which the half of the battalion was down, dead or wounded, before they could strike a blow, and this without the presence of the Prince to stimulate the soldier; but, before him, no man would flinch from certain death when an order was given.

The honesty was singular. I remember that one day, when I was in Cettinje, two Austrian officers came up from Cattaro, and one of them lost on the road a gold medal he wore, which was picked up by a poor woman pa.s.sing with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had lost the medal. s.e.xual immorality was so rare that a single case in Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of the great war was disastrous. The Russians introduced beggary and prost.i.tution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during the two later years made theft common; but stealing was considered such a disgrace by the Montenegrins that during all my residence there I had only one experience,--the theft of a small pocket revolver by my first Dalmatian horse-keeper, and I think that robbery with violence was never heard of in the princ.i.p.ality. During the third year I carried, for distribution among the families of the killed and wounded, the large subsidies of the Russian committees, amounting to several hundred pounds in gold, and in this service I penetrated to the remotest parts of the princ.i.p.ality until I reached the Turkish posts in Old Servia, countries of the wildest character, with a very spa.r.s.e population; and, though it was known that I carried those sums, I was never molested, though I had only one man for escort. And during the two campaigns which I made with the Prince, living in a tent, on the pole of which hung my dispatch-bag containing my store of small money (it being impossible to obtain change for a piece of gold anywhere in the interior), and no guard being kept on the tents, I never lost a _zwanziger_, or any other article than a girth by which the blanket was fastened on my horse when grazing at night; and, as the blanket came back, even that did not look like a theft.

And yet so poor and so contented were they that the life of the primitive man could not have been much simpler. I have seen, in the cold end of September, in the high mountain districts, a whole family of little children, whose united rags would not have made a comfortable garment for one of them, playing with glee in the fields.

On one occasion, when I had been caught by the heavy autumn rains in remote Moratcha, roads washed away and riding a mile impossible, I had to take with me two or three men, beside my guide and horse boy, to make a road where I had to travel, and we were obliged to halt for the night at one of the poorest villages I ever saw in Montenegro. The best house in it was offered me, with such fare as they had, to supplement bread which I had brought from the convent. The house had but one room, with a large bedstead built in it of small trees in the rough, and the beaten ground for floor. The bed was given up to me, and the family lay on the ground with a layer of straw, which was all that the bedstead had in the way of bedding. When we left in the morning I was asked for no compensation, nor did it seem to be expected; but, as my silver had been expended, I gave the woman of the house (the husband being at the war) a gold ten-franc piece. She took it shamefacedly, turned it over and over, looked at it curiously, and then asked my guide, "What is this?" It was the first time in her life that she had seen a gold coin, and the guide had to explain to her that it could be changed into many of the zwanzigers or beshliks which were the only coins she knew. And with all this poverty they seemed most happy when they could extend their poor hospitality to a stranger, and always reluctant to receive any compensation, though the Prince was obliged to furnish to the general population about half the breadstuffs they used in the year.

Seven senators were always on duty near the Prince; they received about $250 a year each when on duty, at other times nothing. The entire civil list of the Prince amounted to about $250,000 a year, from which all the expenses of the government, civil, military, and diplomatic, had to be paid. But for the subsidies of Russia and Austria-Hungary the entire people must have migrated long ago, and I have several times heard Montenegrins say, when asked why they did not build more substantial houses, that "they were not going to stay there long, but meant to get a better country." And yet, like most mountaineers, they were so attached to this rugged and infertile country of theirs that there was no punishment so hard as exile.

During the greater part of the time I spent in the princ.i.p.ality the entire male adult population was on the frontier, or fighting just beyond it, and, when a messenger was wanted, the official took a man out of the prison and sent him off, with no apprehensions of his not returning. One such messenger I remember to have been sent to Cattaro, in Austrian territory, with a sum of three thousand florins to be paid to the banker there, and he came back before night and reported at the prison. Jonine told me that one day, being in Cattaro, he was accosted by a Montenegrin, who begged for his intercession with the Prince to let him out of prison. "But," said the Russian official, "you are no more in prison than I am; what do you mean?" "Oh," said the man, "I have only come down for a load of skins for Voivode So-and-so, but I must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje." The prison was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal terms; and if, as sometimes happened, the guard was called away, any of the prisoners was ready to take his rifle and duties for the moment.

I have seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do.

He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the Albanian raids, the agricultural and much other work fell necessarily to the women. When there were considerable flittings from Cettinje, and the amount of baggage to be carried down to Cattaro was large, it was always allotted to one of the most intelligent men to judge of the weight; and when it was a heavy package he said, "This is the load of a man," or, if a light load, "This is for a woman," many of whom were waiting, eager for the chance of gaining something by their labor. But no compensation will induce a Montenegrin to accept a work which is considered not the work of a man.

In military courage and docility the Montenegrin probably stands at the head of European races. He is born brave, and comes under the law of military obedience as soon as he can carry arms. The good wish for the boy baby in his cradle is, "May you not die in your bed," and to face death is to the boy or man the most joyous of games. I have seen a man, in the midst of a hot interchange of rifle bullets between the Turkish trenches and our own, the trenches occupying the crests of two parallel ranges of low hills, go around outside the works and climb with the greatest deliberation up the hillside, exposed to the Turkish fire, and back over the breastwork into our trenches, all the time under a hail of rifle bullets. During the siege operations at Niksich the Prince was obliged to issue an order of the day forbidding burial to any man killed in this ostentatious exposure to the Turkish fire, so many men having been killed while standing on the crests of the shelter trenches in pure bravado. While lying at headquarters at Orealuk (where the Prince had a little villa), waiting the opening of the campaign of 1877, I was walking on the terrace with him one day after dinner when I noticed a boy of sixteen or eighteen standing at the end of the terrace with his cap in his hand, the usual form of asking for an audience. "Now I'll show you an interesting thing," said the Prince, as he made a sign to the boy to approach. "This boy is the last of a good family, whose father and brothers were all killed in the last battle, and I ordered him to go home and stay with his mother and sisters, that the family might not become extinct." As the boy drew near and stopped before us, his head down and his cap in his hands, the Prince said to him, "What do you want?" "I want to go back to my battalion," the boy replied. "But," replied the Prince, "you are the last of the family, and I cannot allow a good family to be lost; you must go home and take care of your mother." The boy began to cry bitterly. The Prince then asked him if he would go home quietly and stay there, or take a flogging and be allowed to fight. He shook his head and stood silent a little while and then broke out, "Well! it isn't for stealing; I'll take the flogging!" that being the deepest disgrace which can befall a Montenegrin. And he broke down utterly when the Prince finally said that he must go home, for his family was a distinguished one, and he was not willing that no man should be left of it to keep the name. "But," said the boy, "I want to avenge my father and brothers," this being the highest obligation of every Montenegrin. The boy went away still crying, but when he had gone the Prince said, "I know that he will be in the next battle in spite of anything I can say."

CHAPTER XXVII

THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA

I have antic.i.p.ated the events of the year, but this ill.u.s.tration of the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will help to give significance to the story. Without being undiplomatically frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his role on the other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended on Montenegrin action, and that he, to a certain extent, must permit his people to follow their sympathies. The young men went in groups without any pretense of organization, with their rifles and yataghans, and, when the opportunity offered, took part in any pending skirmish, and then came home, to be replaced by others. To have forbidden this would have made the people mutinous, and the Dalmatians, though under the authority of Austria, were no more closely held to neutrality than the Montenegrins. The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way, allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and a.s.sume the direction of the insurrection.

There was nothing more to be learned in Montenegro that belonged to war correspondence, and I went back to Cattaro. There I learned that there was a great a.s.semblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner of the princ.i.p.ality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom they defeated disastrously in 1869. The Crivoscians contributed an important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.

Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the storm should be over,--wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of their hasty flight from "the abomination of desolation," for it seemed as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything out of his house, and woe had been p.r.o.nounced upon them that were with child and them that gave suck in those days. I had seen enough of the horrors of suppression of Christian discontent by the Mussulmans of Crete, but the brutality of the Slavonic Islam in time of peace was other and bitterer than the Cretan, and the miserable remnant of escaped rayahs of Herzegovina was the very ragged fringe of humanity.

I wish every statesman who had ever favored tonics for the "sick man"

could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the d.a.m.ning accusation against the "unspeakable Turk" in these escapes of the peaceful stragglers from ma.s.sacre and rapine which every rising in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our civilization. There were whole families in such rags that they would not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city, lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation.

We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,--a ma.s.s of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the Montenegrins housing a double charge.

I was desirous to learn from themselves the details of their oppression, and my friend questioned one group as to what they had to complain of. It was practically everything but death,--their cattle taken, their crops ravaged or reaped by the agas, the honor of wives and daughters the sport of any Mussulman ruffian who pa.s.sed their way.

One tall, gaunt old woman, who had not spoken, but listened, with a face like a stone, to all that the others replied, suddenly threw her ragged robe over her head and burst into a tempest of tears. Another turned to me a stolid face, saying, "Gospodin! we do not know what a virgin is!" I saw enough of it before I had finished to have made the world turn Turcophobe. And twenty years later we hear of the same fruits of the same regime and, as I found then, Christian statesmen who tolerate it.

I tried to penetrate to the scene of the fighting in Herzegovina, but was on all sides warned that from Grahovo it was impossible; it was necessary to return to Ragusa. There I learned that a fight had just taken place on the road between Trebinje and Ragusa. There is a good carriage road between the two cities, and, in company with two colleagues, and under the guidance of a daring carriage driver, we went to Trebinje. The plain between the frontier and Trebinje is a waste of limestone crags and blocks, scattered as if after a combat of t.i.tans, a miserable stunted vegetation springing between the rocks, capable of hiding thousands of men within a rifle-shot from the road, and, as we found, actually hiding a good many. But word had been sent before by our friends the patriots, and we only caught a glimpse of one insurgent, and saw one dead Turk, a victim of the last skirmish, whose body the garrison had not dared come out to bury.

We brought the first news the pasha had received in five days. He gave me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men. I had seen many Turkish pashas, but never one of that type,--amiable, lethargic, and quite indisposed to do any harm to anybody, and he could not understand why the insurgents could not let him alone; he did not want to disturb them. He complained bitterly that ill-disposed people had been stirring up the population of his province and that, though he had a force of two thousand men, the disorderly Herzegovinians made it very difficult for his men to go about. It was really pathetic to hear him. He wished harm to no one; so courteous and civilized-over was he that one could easily imagine that such officials at Constantinople might give the Turcophile color to a _corps diplomatique_. Invited to coffee by the Austrian consul, I heard the views of a man whose experiences have been equaled by few, for he had been fourteen years at that post; and he fully confirmed the impressions I had from the refugees at Grahovo. But, on the other side of the matter, I was really interested in the Turkish troops, so good-natured, so patient, and not in the least concerned at having been several months besieged and blockaded, supplies short, and relief not even hoped for. I hated the system, but I could not help liking its victims on both sides.

Returning to Ragusa, I found Ljubibratich on the point of returning to the insurgents' camp at Grebci, just over the Austrian frontier, and only about three hours' walk, we were told, from Ragusa. They came with unrestricted freedom from camp into Ragusa, carried away what supplies of any kind they needed, and, when ill, came to the hospital of the city. Dalmatia and its medley of races are still in the Eastern state of activity, in which time is of no account; and, instead of getting off in the early morning to return before night, as arranged, we left Ragusa at 2 P.M. We were in October, and the shortening days did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those in Montenegro. On the way across the frontier the going was simply climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the camp only at dusk.

Grebci was an abandoned village of the Herzegovinian population, robbed and maltreated even here within a rifle-shot of the Austrian territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the frontier. There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare. There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent of Duzi; Luka Petcovich, a Herzegovinian of the Montenegrin frontier, a tried Turk fighter; and the fighting popes of three villages of Orthodox Christians, Bogdan Simonich, Minje, and Milo. There was a small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux,--one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,--ten Russians, and a few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty s.h.i.+p's biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before. The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable. We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed. In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of victory permitted by the circ.u.mstances.

The Italians sang songs, and the whole band made merry till far into the night, when the correspondents, the honored guests, to be served with the best of the accommodations, were shown to the abandoned house of the captain of the village, a stone-built hut, the only one of two stories, which gave us a board floor to sleep on in the upper story, garnished with a bundle of straw for each of us, on which we lay down to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering, and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the first daylight came we turned out and made our way back to Ragusa.

Dissensions and mutual recriminations followed the defeat of Utovu, Peko openly expressing his disgust with the insurgents of the plain, who were braver when there was no enemy than when the fighting was imminent, and he marched off to a position in the hilly country nearer the Montenegrin frontier, leaving Ljubibratich with the men of the low country. The lull brought into action that Shefket Pasha who, the following year, inaugurated the "Bulgarian atrocities," and who, declining to attack the band of Peko, came to vent his prowess on the people of the Popovo plain, of whom about five thousand had returned from exile in Dalmatia under the guarantee of the Turkish authorities of freedom from molestation on resuming their ordinary vocations.

These were all Catholics, and the Catholics of Herzegovina and Bosnia have always been submissive, even to all the rigors of the Turkish rule, while the Orthodox Christians have been the rebels, the popes being generally the captains in time of war. Shefket, disregarding the guarantees of his government, marched on the villages of Popovo, killed or carried away prisoners all the men who did not escape again over the frontier, and allowed the bas.h.i.+-bazouks to plunder and ravage. Male children were killed with the men; and the women, abandoning everything they could not carry, returned to Austrian territory, where I visited them to get the facts of the matter.

The result was that I decided to go to Mostar and lay the facts before the consuls, who had been charged to form a commission to investigate and report on the state of things in Herzegovina. I was joined by the correspondent of "Le Temps" and a Belgian engineer engaged on the new road beyond Seraievo, and we engaged a courageous coachman to drive us to the capital of Herzegovina, for timid people would not venture to make the journey, such was the anarchy of the country. As far as Metcovich we were in Austrian territory, but there we fell into the Asiatic order of things, meeting a frontier guard of ragged Turkish regulars, to whom the visas on our pa.s.sports seemed of small account, in view of their evident desire to regard us as enemies; and all along the road to Mostar we had the scowling faces of the native Mussulmans bent on us as we pa.s.sed, and the few Christians we saw wore an air of harelike timidity.

The city of Mostar is one of the most picturesque I have ever seen. At that time its dirt, decay, and generally unkempt appearance added to the picturesqueness, but not to the comfort. We got shelter at a khan, whose owner hardly knew if he dared admit a Christian guest; but the authority of the English consul, Mr. Holmes, rea.s.sured him, and we were admitted to the society of more fleas than I had considered possible at that time of the year. I had, however, provided myself with an ample supply of the Dalmatian product known as "flea powder,"

the triturated leaves of the red camomile which grows in great perfection all over the mountains of Dalmatia and Montenegro, as if nature had foreseen that it would be especially needed there, and I slept in comparative immunity, though my prior experiences in hostelry had never given me an adequate understanding of the khan filth and discomfort.

I found that the consuls had all been fully informed of the general state of the country and the treachery exercised by the Turkish commanders, and Holmes told me that he had reported to the amba.s.sador at Constantinople what he had learned, and that his report had been sent back with orders to make it less unfavorable to the Turks. Holmes (later Sir William Holmes, the distinction being well deserved for the courage and honesty with which, though strongly Turcophile in his tendencies, he exposed the abuses) said to me, relating this fact, "What can I do? I tell him what I know to be the facts as I have learned them, and he wants me to change them to make the report more favorable to the Turks!" I put his case before the public in the "Times," and the honest fellow reaped the reward he deserved, though against the will of his amba.s.sador.

Here I met again an old Cretan friend, Server Pasha, sent to try the same silly, futile tactics which so failed in Crete, i.e. offering the insurgents elaborate paper reforms in exchange for actual submission.

He reminded me of the reply of the local commandant of the army at Mostar when one of the consuls remonstrated at the authorities having taken no action in a case of peculiarly brutal a.s.sa.s.sination in the city of Mostar, the author of which had not even been arrested. The Colonel Bey replied, astonished, to the indignant consul, "Why, haven't we made a report?" The case was rather a peculiar one: a young Mussulman, having received a present of a new rifle, went out into the suburbs, and, seeing a Christian boy gathering the grapes from his mother's vineyard, took a pot shot at him and shot him through the body. The young a.s.sa.s.sin was carried in triumph about the town on the shoulders of his playmates, and was never in any way punished for the crime. I had the story from the surgeon who attended the Christian boy, and from Mr. Holmes. I took a keen delight in illuminating the intelligent mind of Server Pasha as to the true condition of the country, telling him what I had seen and reported to the "Times;" and, as he knew me well, and that I was trustworthy in my reports,--for he knew how A'ali Pasha had regarded me,--he was in a curious state of mental distress. On his report to Constantinople, the consul-general at Ragusa, an Italian Levantine called Danish Effendi, whom I had also known at Syra in the old days, was ordered to make an investigation into the Popovo atrocities, and, being under the eyes of a large body of correspondents and a Christian public, he reported confirming my report.

Our return to Ragusa was not entirely free from excitement, for the indigenous Mussulman had less avidity for prey he saw going into the trap, Mostar, than for that which he saw escaping, and we had to face small predatory detachments of bas.h.i.+-bazouks raiding in the country we pa.s.sed through, who looked at us with eyes of fire, and muttered in no doubtful language, interpreted by my colleague of "Le Temps," who knew Turkish, what they would be glad to do with us. As we sat eating our lunch in the shelter of a hovel by the roadside, while the horses were baiting, a party of the fanatics watched us with growing malignity and a truculent interchange of sentiments of an evidently unfriendly nature. To puzzle them as to our status, I took the pains to repeat in conversation with my colleague the formula of adherence to the faith as it is in Islam, a sc.r.a.p of Arabic I had learned in Crete, the repet.i.tion of which, according to the rite, is equivalent to the recognition of Mahomet and his teachings. The effect on them was curious, and, though they evidently did not consent to regard us as of the true faith, they as evidently were puzzled, and we went our way unmolested; but I felt more at my ease, I am willing to admit, when we pa.s.sed the last Turkish post on the road.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A JOURNEY IN MONTENEGRO AND ALBANIA