Our defeat at Istip had not been forgotten. Since then we had awaited only a reasonable excuse for taking a reasonable risk. One of the Austrians came in with the account of a combat between a Servian band and a Turkish regiment, which had taken place two days before at a spot in the mountains above a hamlet named Pschtinia, several hours’ ride towards the Bulgarian border. This was justification for breaking the Turks’ cordon about us. Our papers had sent us many miles at heavy expense, and we must have exclusive news. Better reading, to be sure, is the cool, considered report of reports written at headquarters, but the true correspondent always prefers to date his stuff at the firing-line.
To assure ourselves that we were taking no unnecessary risk, that there was no chance of securing permission to seek the scene of this fight, we called on the Governor-General, who had duped and deceived us many times—no doubt to his quiet satisfaction, though he was always too much of a gentleman to display delight in our dilemma.
‘Ah,’ said Hussein Hilmi Pasha, as we sipped his coffee, ‘you went to Istip, and were prevented from visiting Garbintzi. I sent orders to turn you back. As I have often told you, effendi, it is dangerous in the interior; one cannot say where a “brigand”’—his excellency meant a Bulgarian insurgent—‘may be lurking to shoot the European. I have letters from the chiefs threatening to kill a consul. As you know, they hope to make trouble for us with the Powers.’
‘But, excellency, you may give us an escort.’
‘Even with escort one is unsafe. They can fire at you from a mountain side high up above. They are fiends, these brigands; they do not care if they are killed themselves.’
‘But we were permitted to cross a most lawless section of the country, and were stopped only when we sought to visit the scene of a fight. Surely, your excellency, this is a mistaken policy on your part; we must gather that there is something to hide from correspondents.’ We had put down this argument before.
‘There is nothing to hide. Come to me, and I shall tell you the truth about all affairs. But I can permit no more travelling in the interior.’
The same old story. We left the pasha’s presence pretending disappointment. But his threat of Bulgarian ‘brigands’ did not disturb us, and we were willing to take the chance of encountering Albanians. We were going to Pschtinia. The game was not difficult; it required simply coolness and courage and a knowledge of the ways of the Turk. The Englishman possessed sufficient of the first two requisites, and I had dealt with the Ottoman authorities for more than a year.
Late that evening we sent our dragoman for a Turkish coachman, and hired him to be on hand the following morning at nine o’clock, Turkish time, to take us to Kalkandele, an Albanian town about the same distance off as is Pschtinia, but in the opposite direction. We knew the native coachman’s ways.