Next morning the telegraph wire from Durazzo began again to click the instrument in the room above the post office. Orders were coming from Ahmet Bey Mati. Among them, orders that we should have guides, horses, and interpreters for our trip to the mountains; a message to us that the chiefs of Mati and Merdite, and the prefect of Scutari, had been advised of our coming and would give us all facilities. On the wire the operators talked, and travel was again open on the Durazzo road. News poured upon us.
Hamid Bey’s forces had been routed and scattered; Hamid Bey’s family had escaped on an Italian gunboat; Hamid Bey had been pursued, turned back on the very shore where a boat waited for him, was being hunted northward through the mountains. Three men had been hanged at Shijak, and the han there, which had been Hamid Bey’s headquarters, was burned. Durazzo had made no resistance to Ahmet. Ahmet had fined Durazzo five thousand napoleons—twenty thousand dollars—to punish it for not resisting Hamid Bey. Tirana was fined five thousand napoleons for not helping the government when the Dibra men came in. Ahmet Bey had arrested twenty-nine men, who would be tried in court for treason. Five villages on Sied Bey’s estate were ashes, the families homeless. Hamid Bey’s property was confiscated; his country house would be burned. Byram Gjuri had fled to Belgrade. Scutari had not been attacked. Zija Dibra would be taken to-morrow to Durazzo, to be put on a steamer for Constantinople. All Albania was quiet.
That day I met on the street His Excellency Spiro Koleka, Minister of Public Works, who had called upon us in the night when the government was fleeing from Tirana. “Vous voyez, madame,” said he, triumphantly, “Je vous ai dit la vérité. Tout est tranquil.”
There is no more to this tale. This was the end of the March rebellion of 1922, which for a week was one of the lighted fuses to the powder magazine of Europe. It was lighted—I can only guess by whom—and was stamped out by a chief of the Mati mountaineers, in Albania. A little country, which no one knows. Albania—somewhere in the Balkans, isn’t it? Or is it in the Caucasus? One of those places that are always having revolutions, people fighting among themselves. Ought to have sense enough to settle down and go to work.
There is no more to this tale. Our trip to the mountains is not part of it. Only a few more pictures come into my mind, when I remember those days in Tirana.
Picture of Ahmet Zogu, riding back from Durazzo. Riding the tired bay horse, at the head of his Mati men. Riding through a silent crowd which silently parted to let him pass. Rifle and revolver, knives and cartridge belt, gone. The gray business suit cleaned and pressed. A white face, and darkness under the eyes, and eyes that see straight to the end of things. Soft tramping of feet in rawhide opangi behind him, and the Mati men in dingy black-braided trousers and colored sashes and Scanderbeg jackets, rifles all-angled above their kerchiefed heads, pouring down the narrow street. Then lumbering behind them, dust filmed and mud splashed, the empty automobile of the Albanian government, gone forty miles to Durazzo to fetch Ahmet and come back empty because he would ride at the head of his men. It goes last through the gates of Government House, and the crowd can gaze only at the gate and its solitary guard.
Picture of Ahmet in his house. He sits in a gilded Louis Seize chair, under a painted Turkish ceiling. Half a hundred rifles, museum pieces he has chosen from the long mule trains of rifles brought down to Tirana as the mountain tribes are disarmed, are stacked behind his chair. A box telephone on the wall, an English grammar on the table, a Mati man lying on the threshold of the door. Ahmet saying: “Albania needs men, needs trained men. What am I, with power in my hands that I cannot use because I am ignorant? I do not know Europe, America. Tirana needs factories, Albania needs industries. The people are starving and ragged; they walk with bare feet over the earth that covers their fortunes. We need capitalistic development, not a hundred years from now, but to-day. I am no good for that. How can we handle this? You are from America. Can you tell us? Oil, mines, forests, water power, land—what can Albania do with them, without trained men?”
Another picture, a little one. Ahmet smiling. “Ah, but you wouldn’t have been surprised if you had known, as I did, the men who were the rebels. They were rich men. I thought, ‘Not all will be killed in the fighting; we will capture some, arrest others. Why try them and hang them? Their money will be more useful than their bodies. We will try them and fine them.’ I thought how much money they had, and decided there was enough money there to pay for electric lights for Tirana, so naturally I sent for engineers to go out as soon as the Dibra trail was clear.”
“You had no doubt that you’d clear the trail?”
“I had no time to doubt. I was busy clearing it.”