A TRUDGE TO TREBINJE.
1875.
[This paper, as giving the impressions of a first visit to the soil of Herzegovina, during an early stage of the war, has been reprinted, with the change of a few words, as it was first written.]
The first step which any man takes beyond the bounds of Christendom can hardly fail to mark a kind of epoch in his life. And the epoch becomes more memorable when the first step is taken into an actual "seat of war," where the old strife between Christian and Moslem is still going on with all the bitterness of crusading days. In Europe it is now in one quarter only that such a step can be made by land with somewhat less of formality than is often needed in passing from one Christian state to another. It is now only in the great south-eastern peninsula that the frontier of the Turk marches upon the dominions of any Christian power; and, now that Russia and the Turk are no longer immediate neighbours, the powers on which his frontier marches are, with one exception, states which have been more or less fully liberated from his real or asserted dominion. That exception is to be found in the Hadriatic dominions of Austria; and certainly no more striking contrast can be imagined than that which strikes the traveller as he passes on this side from Christian to Moslem dominion. Let us suppose him to be at Ragusa, with his ears full of tales from the seat of war, all of which cannot be true, but all of which may possibly be false. The insurgents have burned a Turkish village. No; it was a Christian village, and the Turks burned it. The Turks have murdered seven Roman Catholics. The Turks have murdered seventy Roman Catholics—a difference this last which may throw light on some cases of disputed numbers in various parts of history. The Turks have threatened Austrian subjects. Austrian subjects have attacked the Turks. An Italian has had his head cut off by the Turks just beyond the frontier. A Turkish soldier has been found lying dead in the road a little further on. These two last stories come on the authority of men who have seen the bodies, so that we have got within the bounds of credible testimony. Meanwhile the one thing about which there is no doubt is the presence and the wretchedness of the unhappy Herzegovinese women and children whose homes have been destroyed either by friends or by enemies, and who are seeking such shelter as public and private charity can give in hospitable Ragusa. All these things kindle a certain desire to get at least a glimpse of the land where something is certainly going on, though it may not be easy to know exactly what. Between Ragusa and Trebinje there is just now no actual fighting; the road is reported to be perfectly safe; only it is advisable to get a passport visé by the Turkish consul. The passports are visé, but, so far for the credit of the Turks, it must be added that, though duly carried, they were never asked for. The party, four in number—three English and one Russian—presently set forth from Ragusa. It is now as easy to get a carriage at Ragusa as in any other European town. So our party sets out behind two of the small but strong and sure-footed horses of the country, to get a glimpse of what, to two at least of their number, were the hitherto unknown lands of Paynimrie.
As long as we are on Austrian territory there is nothing to fear or to complain of but those evils which no kings or laws can cure. The day was rainy—so rainy that a word was once or twice murmured in favour of turning back; but it was deemed faint-hearted to turn again in an undertaking which had been once begun. On the Austrian side the rain was certainly to be regretted, as damping the charm of the glorious prospect from the zigzag road which winds up from Ragusa to the frontier point of Drino. Ragusa, nestling among hills and forts and castles, the isle of La Croma keeping guard over the haven which has ceased to be a haven, the wide Hadriatic stretching to the horizon, form a picture surpassed by but few pictures even in the glorious scenery of the Dalmatian coast. On the other side, it was perhaps no great harm if the rain made the savage land between Drino and Trebinje seem more savage still. At the top of the height the Austrian guard-house is reached, a guard-house which the line of the frontier causes to be overlooked by a Turkish fort above it. The guardians of the borders of Christendom look wild enough in their local dress; but the wildness is all outside, though one certainly does not envy them their watch on so dreary a spot. Hard by is the place where the Italian lost his head; but the Italian was openly in the ranks of the insurgents; so, though the thought is a little thrilling, our present travellers feel no real danger for their heads. The frontier is now passed; we are in the land where the Asiatic and Mahometan invader still holds European and Christian nations in bondage. We see no immediate sign of his presence. The Turkish guard-house is at some distance from the Austrian, in order to watch the pass on the other side, where the road begins to go down towards Trebinje, as the Austrian guards the road immediately up from Ragusa. But, if as yet we see not the Turk, we feel his presence in another way. In one point at least we have suddenly changed from civilization to barbarism. The excellently kept Austrian road at once stops—that is to say, its excellent keeping stops; the road goes on, only it is no longer mended in Austrian but in Turkish fashion—a fashion of which the dullest English highway board would perhaps be ashamed. We presently begin to see something cf the land of Herzegovina, or at least of that part of it which lies between Ragusa and Trebinje. It may be most simply described as a continuous mass of limestone. The town lies in a plain surrounded by hills, and it would be untrue to say that that plain is altogether without trees or without cultivation. Close to the town tobacco grows freely, and before we reach the town, as we draw near to the river Trebenitza, the dominion of utter barrenness has come to an end. But the first general impression of the land is one of utter barrenness, and for a great part of our course, long after we have come down into the lower ground, this first general impression remains literally true. It is not like a mountain valley or a mountain coast, with a fringe of inhabited and cultivated land at the foot of the heights. All is barren; all is stone; stone which, if it serves no other human purpose, might at least be used to make the road better. That road, in all its Turkish wretchedness, goes on and on, through masses of limestone of every size, from the mountains which form the natural wall of Trebinje down to lumps which nature has broken nearly small enough for the purposes of MacAdam. Through the greater part of the route not a house is to be seen; there are one or two near the frontier; there is hardly another till we draw near to the town, when we pass a small village or two, of which more anon. Through the greater part of the route not a living being is to be seen. In such a wilderness we might at least have looked for birds of prey; but no flight of vultures, no solitary eagle, shows itself. As for man, he seems absent also, save for one great exception, which exception gives the journey to Trebinje its marked character, and which brings thoroughly home to us that we are passing through a seat of war.
It will be remembered that, early in the war, the insurgents were attacking the town of Trebinje, and, among later rumours, were tales of renewed attacks in that quarter. But at the time of our travellers' journey the road was perfectly open, and no actual fighting was going on in the neighbourhood. Trebinje however was on the watch: the plain before the town was full of tents, and, long before the town or the tents were within sight, the sight of actual campaigners gave a keen feeling of what was going on. Flour is to be had in the stony land only by seeking it within the Austrian frontier, and to the Austrian frontier accordingly the packhorses go, with a strong convoy of Turkish soldiers to guard them. Twice therefore in the course of their journey, going and coming back, did our travellers fall in with the Turkish troops on their way to and from the land of food. For men who had never before seen anything of actual warfare there was something striking in the first sight of soldiers, not neat and trim as for some day of parade, but ragged, dirty, and weather-stained with the actual work of war. And there was something more striking still in the thought that these were the old enemies of Europe and of Christendom, the representatives of the men who stormed the gates of the New Rome and who overthrew the chivalry of Burgundy and Poland at Nikopolis and at Varna. But the Turk in a half-European uniform has lost both his picturesqueness and his terrors, and the best troops in Europe would be seen to no great advantage on such a day and on such a march. And perhaps Turkish soldiers, like all other men and things, look differently according to the eyes with which they are looked at. Some eyes noticed them as being, under all their disadvantages, well-made and powerful-looking men. Other eyes looked with less pleasure on the countenances of the barbarians who were brought to spread havoc over Christian lands. All however agreed that, as the armed votaries of the Prophet passed before them, the unmistakeable features of the Æthiop were not lacking among the many varieties of countenance which they displayed. But the Paynim force, though it did no actual deed of arms before the eyes of our party, did something more than simply march along the road. The realities of warfare came out more vividly when, at every fitting point, skirmishers were thrown off to occupy each of the peaked hills and other prominent points which line the road like so many watchtowers.
The armed force went and came back that day without any need for actually using their arms. Insurgent attacks on the convoys are a marked feature of the present war; but our travellers had not the opportunity of seeing such a skirmish. Still before long they did see one most speaking sign of war and its horrors. By the banks of the Trebenitza a burned village first came in sight. The sight gives a kind of turn to the whole man; still a burned village is not quite so ugly in reality as it sounds in name. The stone walls of the houses are standing; it is only the roofs that are burned off. But who burned the village, and why? He would be a very rash man who should venture to say, without the personal witness of those who burned it, or saw it burned. Was it a Christian village burned by Turks? Was it a Turkish village burned by Christians? Was it a Christian village burned by the insurgents because its inhabitants refused to join in the insurrection? Was it a Christian village burned by its own inhabitants rather than leave anything to fall into the hands of the Turks? If rumour is to be trusted, cases of all these four kinds have happened in the course of the war. All that can be said is that the village has a church and shows no signs of a mosque, and that, while the houses were burned, the church was not. The burned village lay near a point of the river which it is usually possible to ford in a carriage. This time however, the Trebenitza—a river which, like so many Greek rivers, loses itself in a katabothra—was far too full to be crossed in this way, and our travellers had to leave their carriage and horses and get to Trebinje as they could. After some scrambling over stones, a boat was found, which strongly suggested those legends of Charon which are far from having died out of the memory of the Christians of the East. A primitive punt it was, with much water in it, which Charon slowly ladled out with a weapon which suggested the notion of a gigantic spoon. Charon himself was a ragged object enough, but, as became his craft, he seemed master of many tongues. We may guess that his native speech would be Slave, but one of the company recognized some of his talk for Turkish, and the demand for the two oboli of old was translated into the strange phrase of "dieci groschen." To our travellers the words suggested was the expiring coinage of the German Empire; they did not then take it how widely the groat had spread its name in the south-eastern lands. At first hearing, the name sounded strange on the banks of the Trebenitza; but in the absence of literal groats or groschen, the currency of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was found in practice to do just as well. Then our four pilgrims crossed and crossed again, the second time with much gladness of heart, as for a while things looked as if no means of getting back again were forthcoming, and it was not every one of the party that had a heart stout enough even to think of trying to swim or wade. Charon's second appearance was therefore hailed with special pleasure.
From the crossing-place to Trebinje itself our travellers had to trudge as they could along a fearfully rough Turkish path—not rougher though than some Dalmatian and Montenegrin paths—till they reached the town itself, which this delay gave them but little time to examine. The suburbs stretched along the hillside; below, the tents of the Turkish troops were pitched on one side; the Mahometan burial-ground lay on the other. After so much time and pains had been spent in getting to Trebinje, a glimpse of Trebinje itself was all that was to be had. But even a glimpse of Eastern life was something, particularly a glimpse of Eastern life where Eastern life should not be, in a land which once was European. It is the rule of the Turk, it is the effect of his four hundred years of oppression, which makes Trebinje to differ alike from Tzetinje and from Cattaro. The dark, dingy, narrow, streets, the dim arches and vaults, the bazaar, with the Turk—more truly the renegade Slave—squatting in his shop, the gate with its Arabic inscription, the mosques with their minarets contrasting with the church with its disused campanile, all come home to us with a feeling not only of mere strangeness, but of something which is where it ought not to be. It is with a feeling of relief that, after our second trudge, our second voyage, our second meeting with the convoy, we reach the heights, we pass the guard-houses, and find ourselves again in Christendom. Presently Ragusa comes within sight; we are in no mood to discuss the respective merits of the fallen aristocratic commonwealths and of the rule of the Apostolic King. King or Doge or Rector, we may be thankful for the rule of any of them, so as it be not the rule of the Sultan. The difference between four hundred years of civilized government and four hundred years of barbarian tyranny has made the difference between Ragusa and Trebinje.