In military courage and docility the Montenegrin probably stands at the head of European races. He is born brave, and comes under the law of military obedience as soon as he can carry arms. The good wish for the boy baby in his cradle is, "May you not die in your bed," and to face death is to the boy or man the most joyous of games. I have seen a man, in the midst of a hot interchange of rifle bullets between the Turkish trenches and our own, the trenches occupying the crests of two parallel ranges of low hills, go around outside the works and climb with the greatest deliberation up the hillside, exposed to the Turkish fire, and back over the breastwork into our trenches, all the time under a hail of rifle bullets. During the siege operations at Niksich the Prince was obliged to issue an order of the day forbidding burial to any man killed in this ostentatious exposure to the Turkish fire, so many men having been killed while standing on the crests of the shelter trenches in pure bravado. While lying at headquarters at Orealuk (where the Prince had a little villa), waiting the opening of the campaign of 1877, I was walking on the terrace with him one day after dinner when I noticed a boy of sixteen or eighteen standing at the end of the terrace with his cap in his hand, the usual form of asking for an audience. "Now I'll show you an interesting thing," said the Prince, as he made a sign to the boy to approach. "This boy is the last of a good family, whose father and brothers were all killed in the last battle, and I ordered him to go home and stay with his mother and sisters, that the family might not become extinct." As the boy drew near and stopped before us, his head down and his cap in his hands, the Prince said to him, "What do you want?" "I want to go back to my battalion," the boy replied. "But," replied the Prince, "you are the last of the family, and I cannot allow a good family to be lost; you must go home and take care of your mother." The boy began to cry bitterly. The Prince then asked him if he would go home quietly and stay there, or take a flogging and be allowed to fight. He shook his head and stood silent a little while and then broke out, "Well! it isn't for stealing; I'll take the flogging!" that being the deepest disgrace which can befall a Montenegrin. And he broke down utterly when the Prince finally said that he must go home, for his family was a distinguished one, and he was not willing that no man should be left of it to keep the name. "But," said the boy, "I want to avenge my father and brothers," this being the highest obligation of every Montenegrin. The boy went away still crying, but when he had gone the Prince said, "I know that he will be in the next battle in spite of anything I can say."
CHAPTER XXVII
THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA
I have anticipated the events of the year, but this illustration of the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will help to give significance to the story. Without being undiplomatically frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his rôle on the other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended on Montenegrin action, and that he, to a certain extent, must permit his people to follow their sympathies. The young men went in groups without any pretense of organization, with their rifles and yataghans, and, when the opportunity offered, took part in any pending skirmish, and then came home, to be replaced by others. To have forbidden this would have made the people mutinous, and the Dalmatians, though under the authority of Austria, were no more closely held to neutrality than the Montenegrins. The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way, allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and assume the direction of the insurrection.
There was nothing more to be learned in Montenegro that belonged to war correspondence, and I went back to Cattaro. There I learned that there was a great assemblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner of the principality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom they defeated disastrously in 1869. The Crivoscians contributed an important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.
Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the storm should be over,—wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of their hasty flight from "the abomination of desolation," for it seemed as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything out of his house, and woe had been pronounced upon them that were with child and them that gave suck in those days. I had seen enough of the horrors of suppression of Christian discontent by the Mussulmans of Crete, but the brutality of the Slavonic Islam in time of peace was other and bitterer than the Cretan, and the miserable remnant of escaped rayahs of Herzegovina was the very ragged fringe of humanity. I wish every statesman who had ever favored tonics for the "sick man" could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the damning accusation against the "unspeakable Turk" in these escapes of the peaceful stragglers from massacre and rapine which every rising in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our civilization. There were whole families in such rags that they would not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city, lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation. We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the Montenegrins housing a double charge.
I was desirous to learn from themselves the details of their oppression, and my friend questioned one group as to what they had to complain of. It was practically everything but death,—their cattle taken, their crops ravaged or reaped by the agas, the honor of wives and daughters the sport of any Mussulman ruffian who passed their way. One tall, gaunt old woman, who had not spoken, but listened, with a face like a stone, to all that the others replied, suddenly threw her ragged robe over her head and burst into a tempest of tears. Another turned to me a stolid face, saying, "Gospodin! we do not know what a virgin is!" I saw enough of it before I had finished to have made the world turn Turcophobe. And twenty years later we hear of the same fruits of the same régime and, as I found then, Christian statesmen who tolerate it.
I tried to penetrate to the scene of the fighting in Herzegovina, but was on all sides warned that from Grahovo it was impossible; it was necessary to return to Ragusa. There I learned that a fight had just taken place on the road between Trebinje and Ragusa. There is a good carriage road between the two cities, and, in company with two colleagues, and under the guidance of a daring carriage driver, we went to Trebinje. The plain between the frontier and Trebinje is a waste of limestone crags and blocks, scattered as if after a combat of Titans, a miserable stunted vegetation springing between the rocks, capable of hiding thousands of men within a rifle-shot from the road, and, as we found, actually hiding a good many. But word had been sent before by our friends the patriots, and we only caught a glimpse of one insurgent, and saw one dead Turk, a victim of the last skirmish, whose body the garrison had not dared come out to bury.
We brought the first news the pasha had received in five days. He gave me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men. I had seen many Turkish pashas, but never one of that type,—amiable, lethargic, and quite indisposed to do any harm to anybody, and he could not understand why the insurgents could not let him alone; he did not want to disturb them. He complained bitterly that ill-disposed people had been stirring up the population of his province and that, though he had a force of two thousand men, the disorderly Herzegovinians made it very difficult for his men to go about. It was really pathetic to hear him. He wished harm to no one; so courteous and civilized-over was he that one could easily imagine that such officials at Constantinople might give the Turcophile color to a corps diplomatique. Invited to coffee by the Austrian consul, I heard the views of a man whose experiences have been equaled by few, for he had been fourteen years at that post; and he fully confirmed the impressions I had from the refugees at Grahovo. But, on the other side of the matter, I was really interested in the Turkish troops, so good-natured, so patient, and not in the least concerned at having been several months besieged and blockaded, supplies short, and relief not even hoped for. I hated the system, but I could not help liking its victims on both sides.
Returning to Ragusa, I found Ljubibratich on the point of returning to the insurgents' camp at Grebci, just over the Austrian frontier, and only about three hours' walk, we were told, from Ragusa. They came with unrestricted freedom from camp into Ragusa, carried away what supplies of any kind they needed, and, when ill, came to the hospital of the city. Dalmatia and its medley of races are still in the Eastern state of activity, in which time is of no account; and, instead of getting off in the early morning to return before night, as arranged, we left Ragusa at 2 P.M. We were in October, and the shortening days did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those in Montenegro. On the way across the frontier the going was simply climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the camp only at dusk.