The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

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.