CHAPTER XXXIV
MORATSHA
Niksich was full of smallpox and fever, and, as there was a great abundance of tents captured with the city, I took one, with an extra baggage-horse and his leader, and started for Moratsha. The wide plain into which we entered after leaving the hills above Niksich was a great pasture land, mottled as I never saw land before with mushrooms. The abundance was extraordinary, but nothing would induce a Montenegrin to eat one. We halted for our first night on the edge of a magnificent natural meadow, where a shepherd had built his hut and was feeding his flocks, and we took advantage of his presence to enjoy some security against the wolves, pitching our tent in a little grove close to him and picketing our horses between the tent and his hut. He and his sons were on guard by turns all night, and the howling of the tantalized wolves came clearly to us at times with, at long intervals, the reports of the guns which were fired to keep them at a distance. They were so near at one time that I got up and fired my fowling-piece out of the tent, and we kept lights burning all night to prevent them from attacking our horses. In the course of the night a thunderstorm came up, and, as we had pitched the tent in a hollow to secure freedom from stones in our beds, the rain, washed out our tent-pegs, and the tent came down on us in our sleep. In the morning I sent to the shepherd for a lamb for breakfast for the men, and he sent us what I took for a full-grown sheep, so large and fat was it, and I sent it back, asking for a lamb. He replied that it was a spring lamb, and the smallest he had. The price of it was about two shillings, and for another he offered to dress it for us.
From there we sent back the tent, and the following night we slept at Velje Duboko, at the bottom of one of the ravines which make the surprises of traveling in that country so great. You proceed along a rolling plain with no suspicion of the cañon before you, and suddenly find yourself on the verge of a cliff, looking down into a valley hundreds of feet deep. Duboko lay by the river's margin fifteen hundred feet below us, to be reached only by a winding journey of an hour, though the shepherds carried on conversation from cliff to cliff above. Here a momentary surprise by the Turkish bands has now and then been possible, but never an occupation of the country. The picturesqueness of the valley of the Duboko above the village can be rarely surpassed by wild landscape, and the whole section, the centre of which is the stronghold of Moratsha, is of a most interesting character, utterly unlike the Czernagora proper.
At the convent of Moratsha I found civilization and comfort. The hegumenos, a Dalmatian by birth, but a patriot of the first quality, and a very militant Christian, made me most welcome. I had some money from the English and Russian committees to distribute amongst the needy wounded and the families of the killed, and the gratitude of the naïve hearts was touching to a degree I never saw in richer countries. But what most surprised them was that some of it came from the English. "Why, English!" exclaimed one old woman, as she started back when told that I was English; "they are a kind of Turk." All the world there thought only of the English as the allies of the Turks, but the hospitality they felt, and could show only in trifles, was unbounded. I had brought with me a battle-axe I had found in the stores of Niksich and taken as my part of the booty, but had not noticed that it had never been sharpened, so that it was useless for cutting. One of the men at the convent took it, and with a common whetstone (for there was nothing in the nature of a grindstone in the place) brought it to razor edge,—a job which a carpenter alone can appreciate; and, when I tried to give him something for it, he put his hands behind him and then ran out of sight. A little fellow, not over four years old, stumbled upstairs to my room to bring me an ear of green maize, the greatest delicacy they know, and another ran to me in the road to offer me a huge and fine potato he was nursing with pride. The walnuts were just then eatable, and one of the men brought me a quantity in his closed hands so that I should not see what he had, and, emptying them into my hands, ran away with all speed lest I should give him something in return. They had been carefully cracked and removed from the shells, as the most delicate attention he could show me.
The convent is an old-time stronghold, but, dominated on three sides by hills which look down into its quadrangle, it would be untenable to rifle fire. It was founded by Stefan Nemanides, son of Bolkan, Prince of the Zeta (a term which comprised all Montenegro and the Berdas), and eldest son of Stefan, Emperor of Servia. The Romanesque church, which occupies the centre of the quadrangle, was built about A.D. 1250, but, having been burnt out by the Turks, it was restored in 1400, the walls being uninjured, and it has never been since damaged; and the frescoes in the chapel, which are older than those in the church, are dated 1420. There are some in the church painted later by a monk from Mount Athos, but decidedly inferior to those in the little chapel.
I was hardly in shelter at the convent when the rains set in, and for nearly two weeks I was weather-bound, for in that wild country, with no roads but the tracks the horses wear in the ground, traveling in the mud of rainy weather is out of the question. In a lull of actual downpour we made an excursion to Kolashin, four hours away, passing through the scene of the defeat of Mehemet Ali Pasha. The hegumenos, who commanded the half battalion of the monastery, showed me the line of the fighting, and described the battle, and certainly it was one of the most extraordinary battles even in the history of this fighting people.
The Turks came from Kolashin by a road which debouches into the valley by a steep descent of about five hundred feet, and they had crowned the heights and planted their battery before the clans could gather, since these had been scattered along a line of thirty or forty miles, uncertain what point would be attacked. Voivode Vucovich, hereditary chief of the Wassoivich, with half a battalion of his own people, was watching and following the Turks from a distance, and, when he saw that the movement was intended for the convent, he sent runners to Peiovich in Drobniak and warned the convent, where was a half battalion of local forces. The regulars formed on the ridge, intrenched themselves, and sent the irregulars, Albanians of the tribe of the Mirdites, down to lead the attack. As soon as these were well entangled in the intricacies of the valley, seeing only the half battalion of Moratsha posted in front of them, Vucovich led an attack down the slope in their rear, getting between them and the regulars, and the Moratshani made a sortie from the convent, which is inclosed by a strong wall, and attacked in front. The Albanians fought desperately for a short time, but, attacked on both sides, though by forces much inferior in the aggregate to their own, they finally broke in panic. A large body ran into a ravine, which proved a cul de sac, for the end up which they hoped to escape was so precipitous that few escaped the infuriated Montenegrins following them, who, when the fight was over, counted eleven hundred dead. The rest of the Albanians continued their flight to Kolashin, the panic involving the regulars, who insisted on returning, and, in spite of all remonstrances of the officers, went back.
The hegumenos, Mitrofan Banovich, whose name deserves record as well as any I heard of in this land of heroes, introduced to me the captain of the Moratsha battalion, who had taken part in the fight. He had lost his son in it, and of his four hundred men twenty-five had been killed and forty put hors de combat from wounds which disabled them from fighting. The Wassoivich had exhausted their ammunition and the unwounded of the Moratshani were only enough to carry away the wounded; had the Turkish regulars maintained the attack, there could have been no further resistance, the way would have been open to take the Montenegrins about Danilograd in the rear, and Suleiman would have had a clear course.
The captain told me of one brave Albanian who had fallen wounded from his horse and taken shelter in a crevice of the rocks, and who had killed two Montenegrins and wounded a third before he was disposed of by one of them getting behind him and shooting him through a crevice in the sheltering rocks. The manner of his death and that of those of his assailants illustrate the war manners of the Montenegrins so completely that I was interested in the case more than in other heroic details of the fight. The Montenegrin makes a question of amour propre in attacking his enemies face to face and by preference with the cold steel. Enemies who fall in the general mêlée by rifle-shot he never considers his "heads;" he claims only those he has killed in hand-to-hand combat. This Albanian was the standard-bearer of his clan, i.e. the hereditary chieftain, and to kill him in hand-to-hand combat was the ambition of the three who attacked him in succession, the shooting from behind being only a matter of necessity.
I remembered at that moment a correspondence I had had years before with Virchow, on the Pelasgi, and their probable relation with the Albanians, whom he regarded as the descendants of the Pelasgi; and, thinking of his collection of skulls, I asked the captain if he knew the spot where the body of the Albanian lay, and if the bones were still there, and when he assured me that they were where he fell, I offered him two florins to bring me the skull, which he did. It was of a man in the prime of life, with the sutures scarcely closed, and only two teeth lacking, and none unsound, and I sent it on to the great craniologist, who replied with warm thanks. The skull, he said, was the finest for intellectual development in his collection, and he read a paper on it before the Imperial German Academy. He was so impressed by its character that he was disposed to consider it as an exceptional skull, and wrote to one of the Austrian officers in Montenegro to ask him to make an effort to send some more, and these, though not, like that of the standard-bearer, of unquestionably pure Albanian stock,—for the aristocracy never intermarry with any other blood than that of their class and race,—all possessed the same intellectual characteristics, justifying him in placing the Albanian at the head of the races of Europe for intellectual capacity.
We reconnoitred Kolashin, and found it an almost open fortress, which was commanded by hills around, and so near that it could be made untenable by rifle fire, which could have been poured in from both sides of the river that ran by it, which, though then a swollen torrent, was under ordinary conditions fordable anywhere. The Turks seemed indisposed to provoke an exchange of shots, and did not trouble us, though we went within easy rifle-shot inspecting the works through my field-glass, and, before leaving, took our luncheon in full sight of the garrison, who were working on some trenches intended for protection from a coup de main from the river. I made a sketch of the fortress, and we withdrew tranquilly. In fact, the Turkish garrisons, so far as my own experience went, were never disposed to begin a fight, and if not molested they never annoyed us by firing on us. The poor fellows only wanted to be left alone. They were, when prisoners, the most amiable people possible, and at one time I saw many in Cettinje, prisoners taken in the fights about Podgoritza, enjoying the freedom of the place and making themselves useful to the women, bringing wood and water, and as inoffensive as children. Many of them, probably young men without domestic ties, refused to return when the treaty of peace was signed, but, with a docility which was as remarkable as their obedience under the atrocious treatment of their own government, only asked for their bread and toleration. I have seen in Cettinje, when the men were all on the frontier fighting, Turkish prisoners enough to take possession of the place if they had been disposed to rise and make a fight with sticks and stones. This was one of the most touching phases of that curious war, a warfare such as the world will hardly see again.
The day after our trip to Kolashin the rain set in again, and we passed nearly a fortnight more at the convent before the weather broke and I was able to set out, taking with me a gang of men to make the roads passable for my horse, so much had the rains wrought havoc with the face of the land. The flooded state of the country and unfordable rivers forbade the trip to Wassoivich, and I was obliged, to my great regret, to relinquish it and to go back to Cettinje, having lost nearly three weeks in the rain at Moratsha. Returning by a different route from that by which I came, I crossed the Duboko at a point much lower down than that of my first striking it, where it makes the most magnificent trout stream I have ever seen. The trout from it feed the Moratsha and the Lake of Scutari. In the Duboko they are caught, according to the statement of a native of the district, as heavy as forty pounds; and Mr. Green, the English consul at Scutari, told me that they were sometimes caught much larger in the lake. There were plenty in the Zeta at Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince's tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid. I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of dynamite, which rarely killed, but only stunned, the larger fish, of which few were retrieved even when stunned or killed. I one day remonstrated indignantly with the Prince for this barbarous butchery, and told him that if he permitted his men to carry it on his son would reign in a fishless country, and he promised to forbid it; but the matter passed from his memory in a day. The Duboko was a safe nursery for the fry, for it was such a torrent that dynamite was useless, since it would have been impossible to retrieve a fish if killed.
Our road lay through the district of Rovtcha, which is considered the poorest for the agriculturist in all the Berdas. It is very hilly, and the rock is, where we passed, a rotten slate which the rains and the torrents cut away rapidly, carrying the alluvium down to the plains and Lake of Scutari. Digging and bridging, we reached, early in the afternoon, the village of Gornje-Rovtcha, and were then informed that it would be impossible to reach another habitation that day, and that the road passed through an immense forest infested by wolves, in which we should be compelled to sleep if we held on. This I had no desire to try, remembering our experience with the shepherds on the first night out from Niksich. So we passed the hours to the dark in shooting at a mark, and went to bed early. The house which was selected to be honored by my repose, the best in the village, was of one room, from which the animals were excluded, with the usual floor of beaten earth. A huge bedstead of small fir poles, the only important piece of furniture in it, was assigned to me, and the family—all women and children—spread their rugs on the ground. After eating a supper brought from the convent, and some potatoes, the only provision, except a little coarse maize bread which the house afforded, we went to bed. The bedstead was abundantly provided with straw, but nought beside, and the fleas routed me from my first sleep and compelled me to evacuate the premises. I took my mattress and went out where my pony was picketed, and, spreading it in his lee, to break the cold north wind fresh from the mountain, I tried to sleep.
The poor horse had supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day's walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could have made myself, but the only effect of which was to break my doze as soon as begun, until I lost my patience with him, and gave him a sound box on the ear, when he turned his head from me, and lay down again. It made my heart ache to be unkind to him, for he was the gentlest and most serviceable friend I had in Montenegro, but I could get nothing to give him if I had paid a guinea the pound for it, and he would not let me sleep. The intelligent brute felt what language could not tell him, and ceased his complaint, though the blow I gave him would hardly have killed a gad-fly on his hair; but it sufficed, and gave me more discomfort than him, for I did not cease to reproach myself for the ungrateful return for his fidelity. But I slept no more, and watched the stars in their courses till the dawn.
A glass of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia. The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw—straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth. Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the principality. Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded one with its glare in the sunlight. Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw. In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry canal, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time. It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.
We reached the convent too late to get to Danilograd that night, considering the condition of the roads, and I asked for shelter for the night. Here, for the first time in my experience with Orthodox convents, lodgings were refused me by the old hegumenos, and I instantly ordered the horses to be loaded again, without attempting to soften his surliness. A few minutes' talk with the captain who was my escort showed him that I was a person too much in favor with the Prince to be treated with such derision, and he came to offer me a place to spread my mattress on a balcony exposed to the south wind and the rain; then, having begun to relent, he went further, and offered me a room, which I refused, and finally his own bed; but even that did not break my inflexible resentment. When he became pathetic in his repentance, however, I accepted a balcony whence I could look down on the fortress of Spuz, within easy range of its sleeping batteries; and then he offered me a supper, which I accepted, and we made peace. In the morning he had become humanized, and he gave me breakfast and showed me the body of St. Stephen, which is kept here in great reverence (not the proto-martyr, but a Montenegrin of the same name). The saint lay in state in a magnificent coffin, as if embalmed, and in his hand was an old and time-yellowed embroidered handkerchief which looked as if it might have been there a century or two. Remembering a dear friend in the Orthodox church to whom the relics of its saints were precious, I asked the hegumenos to sell me this handkerchief. He replied that he dared not take it, but if I had the courage to do so he would not prevent me, so I took the relic and put a twenty franc piece in the treasury of the convent, and went my way.
I found the Prince in his villa at Orealuk, contemplating new movements in a distant future, and, there being evidently nothing to keep me there, I decided to go back to Cettinje and await what was evidently the operation in view,—the movement on Antivari. My poor little pony like myself, only half fed for days, was not in a condition for rapid travel, and, though we pushed on in the rain, which began again, as well as we could, when we reached Rieka it was nearly sunset. Finding no preparation in the little house, our usual shelter there, for any guest, after giving the horse what small ration the village afforded, I resumed the journey at sunset. The horse had come the last few miles very heavily; I had been in the saddle twelve to fourteen hours each of the last two days, and the food I could get for him was insufficient even for a Herzegovinian mountain pony, so that it was hard work to get him to a pace above a slow walk as we approached Rieka; but when we left the place he seemed to realize that he had a work of necessity before him, and that the light would not see him through it, and he showed that he understood the case, for he needed neither spur nor whip to make his best pace over the very rough and difficult road. In spite of his best efforts, the darkness fell on us half way to Cettinje, with rain and a fog which made it impossible to see the way before me, or even to see the horse's ears.
There was on that road, on the mountain which frames on that side the plain of Cettinje, a passage of the bridle-path which even the Montenegrins, used to it, passed always on foot; a sharp ridge, almost an arête of rock, which carries a path hardly wide enough for two horses to pass each other on it, and on each side of which the rock falls away in a steep precipice high enough to leave no hope of survival from a fall down it. If I had dismounted I could not have seen the path before me; to stop and pass the night there, drenched and cold as I was, would have been fatal, for we were in the early cold of autumn in a high country; there was nothing for it but to trust to the horse, and I threw the bridle on his neck and left him to himself. A false step was certain death for us both, but I had no choice. He picked his way as if he were walking amongst eggs, slowly but surely, and we descended into the plain of Cettinje at 10 P.M. without a slip or an attempt on my part to interfere with the discretion of my pony. If I had possessed even an acre of pasture or a settled home where I could have turned out that good beast for the rest of his days, I should never have allowed him to go to another owner, for I knew that I owed him my life.
Of the following campaign, which resulted in the taking of Antivari and Dulcigno, I saw nothing. The jealousy of Jonine had been so excited by my always forestalling him with the news of the war, that he persuaded the Prince not to advise me of the movement; so, while I was waiting at Cettinje for the promised summons to join the staff, the army moved across the country to Rieka secretly, and the first warning we had of the movement was the firing of guns at Antivari. As the Prince gave me no further thought, I waited comfortably, "at mine ease in mine inn," for diplomacy to tie the ends of the well-spun out controversy. Fighting was practically over and my campaign ended.