CHAPTER x.x.xI
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 princ.i.p.ality 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 dest.i.tute 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 ent.i.tled 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 princ.i.p.ality, 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 princ.i.p.ality, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 pa.s.s the night and see the operations of the next day. Until I arrived at his camp Bozo had received no information of the pa.s.sage 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 princ.i.p.alities,--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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage of the Danube by the Russian army, and the recall of Suleiman and his army for the defense of the princ.i.p.alities. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls amongst us without fail. The horses could not graze, and the women who came with their husbands" rations could not reach us without pa.s.sing 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 attaches 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a.s.sured 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 attaches 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 a.s.sembly 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. Subst.i.tute for the rocky ridge which formed the background of the scene the Dardanelles, and the fleet drawn up on the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed the time sh.e.l.ling the redoubts thrown up on the little hillocks around the town, alternating these operations with an occasional a.s.sault 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 x.x.xII
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 circ.u.mstances, 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 princ.i.p.alities. 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.sy 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s the Tara, which bounds the plain on the north, but being driven back with loss. I found Aluga a n.o.ble subalpine country, a rolling plateau with here and there a little lake; to the northwest the grand ma.s.s 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 canon like those of the Yellowstone, and on a little s.p.a.ce 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 x.x.xIII
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-gla.s.s, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sault, 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.sailants 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 a.s.surance 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 grat.i.tude of the poor fellow was embarra.s.sing. 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 G.o.d 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 cava.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 Wa.s.soivich, 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.