THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE

To me Russie’s death was a crushing disaster. The care and constant preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an introduction to the manager of the “Times,” and offered to pay my expenses should the “Times” not accept my letters. I knew so well the condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the “Times” now served me as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same time I arranged to send letters to the New York “Herald,” also as a volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.

Arriving at Trieste in August, 1875, I found that a committee was at work sending arms and ammunition, and, following the coast down, I found other committees at work at Zara and elsewhere, under Austrian auspices, without any attention being paid to their action by the Imperial authorities. At Ragusa I found the headquarters of the agitation, there under the direction of the captain of the port, Kovachevich, a zealous Slavonic patriot. The movement was evidently regarded benevolently by the Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, and the insurgents came openly into the city, and returned again to their fighting with fresh supplies of ammunition and provisions. I pushed on to the Bocche di Cattaro, and at Castel Nuovo found the insurgents coming and going freely, and at Sutorina, in the corner of Herzegovina, which comes to the Gulf of Cattaro, their depot and manufactory of cartridges. The information to be obtained there was abundant, if not always absolutely trustworthy; but on the whole I found the only fault of that which I got from the insurgents was its exaggeration, while what I got from the Turkish consul-general at Ragusa was simple fabrication. Volunteers fully armed went by every steamer, and when they had enough of campaigning they went to Castel Nuovo and refreshed themselves, and returned, quite regardless of the Austrian regulations. I found that the insurrection was spreading through all the mountain section of Herzegovina and along the border of Montenegro, and it was said that strong detachments of Montenegrins were aiding in the operations. The Prince of Montenegro had opposed the insurrection in the early stages of it, and had even sent old Peko Pavlovich to arrest the Herzegovinian leader, Ljubibratich, and carry him to Ragusa, where he left him under Austrian authority, to return freely as soon as his band had reunited. But as, according to the general Slav opinion, there was nothing important to be done without Montenegro, I pushed on to Cettinje to see with my own eyes what there was to see.

The little world about Cettinje has changed so much since this my first visit there, and was so little known then by the outer world, that my experiences there will be to the present day like those which one might have in a perished social organization. The only access to the capital of the principality was by a zigzag bridle-path up from Cattaro to a height of 4500 feet above the sea, a hard, rough road, more easily traveled on foot than in the saddle, and so I traveled it, in the company of a Scotch cavalry officer intending to volunteer. Passing the rocky ridge along which ran the boundary between freedom and Austria, one descended by another precipitous path into the valley of Njegush, the birthplace of the family of the Prince, a circular amphitheatre of rocks, a narrow ridge here and there holding still a little earth on which the people raised a few stalks of maize or a few potatoes, a few square yards of wheat, or a strip of poor grass for the sheep or goats. Every tiny field was terraced against the wash of the rains so that the soil should not be carried away, for the geological formation of this part of the principality, Montenegro proper, is a porous rock, which allows water to filter through it, and which is even so fissured that no stream will form, and the drainage is through the rocks or in katavothra which gush out in mysterious fountains in the Gulf of Cattaro or into the Lake of Scutari.

Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor, with two or three of which one was the house of the Petrovich family of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the “Times” apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had accidentally come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within the gates.

The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery.

Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the principal was the “palace,” a residence which in another country would have been a poor gentleman’s country house. Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a “Times” correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday occurrence. No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as impassive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there, no one seemed at all curious about our business. This was the manner of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information. We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer any questions other than evasively. And it was only after a long acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin. The generations of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to mislead, four hundred years of a national existence of combat and ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia, had developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman. I was, however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where he heard appeals of all kinds, from petitions for help to the last recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which every Montenegrin was entitled, and without which none submitted to an unfavorable judgment.

The moment was critical, for communications had been passing between Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against the Sultan, for which the entire population of the principality was impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the alliance. The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and would be nerveless. The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain the people from going in limited numbers, and in an unobtrusive way, into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem, the Turkish government had never terminated the de jure state of war with the principality, or acknowledged its independence, and the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably, as Troy was for ten years. As to operations in Herzegovina, small bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the frontier when they had had a brush, but all sub rosa.

The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved condition of all the population around. He is a man of large mould, of a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preëminence amongst his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to large men, and a hearty bonhomie which with that simple people was a bond to the most passionate devotion. He is quick-witted and diplomatic, with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head of a family amongst them. He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable. In all but military abilities he had grown curiously to the measure of his place, and his diplomatic abilities more than compensated for the want of the military. And what was most singular was that his early education in Paris had not spoiled the Montenegrin in him.

Probably much of this conserved character was due to the Princess, an admirable woman, who deserves a place amongst the world’s remarkable female sovereigns; for her energy, patriotism, and instinct of the obligations of the crisis were more remarkable than anything else connected with the house of Njegush. Beautiful even at the period in which I first saw her, gifted with a tact and sympathetic manner quite regal in their reach, she held her husband up to action and decision when his own nerves were shaken. A Montenegrin of voïvode stock, the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been the right-hand man of Mirko, the father of the Prince, the commander-in-chief of the previous reign, she had the true Amazonian temper, and would not have hesitated to take the field had the courage of her husband failed him; though, in tranquil times, she was a true Slavonic woman, domestic, affectionate in her family, and effacing herself before her husband. I remember that the Prince told me that, after the splendid victory of Vucidol, he sent two couriers to announce to the Princess at Cettinje the news of the victory, and the first question she asked of them was, “Did the Prince show courage?” and when they replied, with a little Montenegrin craft, that they had had to hold him by force to keep him from plunging into the mêlée, she gave them each a half ducat. “And,” said the Prince, “if they had said that I had led the charge, she would have given them a whole ducat.”

But, with all his civic virtues, the Prince was the very type of a despotic ruler. The word “constitution” was his bugbear, and he would not abate one particular of his absolute power, or tolerate the slightest deflection of his authority in his family, any more than in the principality. His will was the law, and though, in the details of administration, the voïvodes and the “ministers” were trusted, nothing could be decided without his personal supervision, nor was any decision of a tribunal settled without an appeal to him in person. One day, as I sat with him under the Tree of Judgment, we saw in the distance a number of the common people approaching the tree. “Now,” said he, “you will see a curious thing. This is a case of appeal from the decision of the head men of a village on which there had been quartered more of the Herzegovinian refugees in proportion to their population than they thought they should support, so that they sought relief by sending a part of the refugees to a neighboring village which had not had what they considered its due charge. The villagers of the second village appeal from this overcharge, alleging that their means do not permit them to receive more than they actually have.” The rival deputations approached the tree, cap in hand, and, on the Prince giving the order to open the case, it was stated through the head men as the Prince had summarized it. The Prince heard both cases and then asked the head man of the lesser village if they had done as much as they could do in the way of relief, and the head man explained that their village was small and poor (which was quite unnecessary to say of a Montenegrin village), and they could not support more refugees; whereupon the Prince, addressing himself to the deputation of the larger village, repeated to them the parable of the widow and her mite, and, assuring them that the little village had done its best, as the widow did, and they must be content, dismissed the case, and without a word of complaint the two deputations went off together, discussing with each other in the most friendly manner; and the discontent, so far as we could see, was at an end.

But if this patriarchal form of government was interesting, the character of the people under it was still more so, and it was to me a great pleasure and privilege to be enabled to study, as I did for the three years of the insurrection and war, a nation in the earliest stage of true civilization, corresponding as nearly as we can reconstruct ethnology to that of the Greeks in the time of the Trojan war, arms but not men being changed. The honesty and civic discipline were perfect, hospitality limited only by the ability to give it, and the courage and military discipline absolutely unquestioning. If the Prince ordered a position to be stormed, no man would return from the attack till the bugle sounded the recall. I remember charges made during the war in which the half of the battalion was down, dead or wounded, before they could strike a blow, and this without the presence of the Prince to stimulate the soldier; but, before him, no man would flinch from certain death when an order was given.

The honesty was singular. I remember that one day, when I was in Cettinje, two Austrian officers came up from Cattaro, and one of them lost on the road a gold medal he wore, which was picked up by a poor woman passing with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had lost the medal. Sexual immorality was so rare that a single case in Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of the great war was disastrous. The Russians introduced beggary and prostitution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during the two later years made theft common; but stealing was considered such a disgrace by the Montenegrins that during all my residence there I had only one experience, the theft of a small pocket revolver by my first Dalmatian horse-keeper, and I think that robbery with violence was never heard of in the principality. During the third year I carried, for distribution among the families of the killed and wounded, the large subsidies of the Russian committees, amounting to several hundred pounds in gold, and in this service I penetrated to the remotest parts of the principality until I reached the Turkish posts in Old Servia, countries of the wildest character, with a very sparse population; and, though it was known that I carried those sums, I was never molested, though I had only one man for escort. And during the two campaigns which I made with the Prince, living in a tent, on the pole of which hung my dispatch-bag containing my store of small money (it being impossible to obtain change for a piece of gold anywhere in the interior), and no guard being kept on the tents, I never lost a zwanziger, or any other article than a girth by which the blanket was fastened on my horse when grazing at night; and, as the blanket came back, even that did not look like a theft.

And yet so poor and so contented were they that the life of the primitive man could not have been much simpler. I have seen, in the cold end of September, in the high mountain districts, a whole family of little children, whose united rags would not have made a comfortable garment for one of them, playing with glee in the fields. On one occasion, when I had been caught by the heavy autumn rains in remote Moratcha, roads washed away and riding a mile impossible, I had to take with me two or three men, beside my guide and horse boy, to make a road where I had to travel, and we were obliged to halt for the night at one of the poorest villages I ever saw in Montenegro. The best house in it was offered me, with such fare as they had, to supplement bread which I had brought from the convent. The house had but one room, with a large bedstead built in it of small trees in the rough, and the beaten ground for floor. The bed was given up to me, and the family lay on the ground with a layer of straw, which was all that the bedstead had in the way of bedding. When we left in the morning I was asked for no compensation, nor did it seem to be expected; but, as my silver had been expended, I gave the woman of the house (the husband being at the war) a gold ten-franc piece. She took it shamefacedly, turned it over and over, looked at it curiously, and then asked my guide, “What is this?” It was the first time in her life that she had seen a gold coin, and the guide had to explain to her that it could be changed into many of the zwanzigers or beshliks which were the only coins she knew. And with all this poverty they seemed most happy when they could extend their poor hospitality to a stranger, and always reluctant to receive any compensation, though the Prince was obliged to furnish to the general population about half the breadstuffs they used in the year.

Seven senators were always on duty near the Prince; they received about $250 a year each when on duty, at other times nothing. The entire civil list of the Prince amounted to about $250,000 a year, from which all the expenses of the government, civil, military, and diplomatic, had to be paid. But for the subsidies of Russia and Austria-Hungary the entire people must have migrated long ago, and I have several times heard Montenegrins say, when asked why they did not build more substantial houses, that “they were not going to stay there long, but meant to get a better country.” And yet, like most mountaineers, they were so attached to this rugged and infertile country of theirs that there was no punishment so hard as exile.

During the greater part of the time I spent in the principality the entire male adult population was on the frontier, or fighting just beyond it, and, when a messenger was wanted, the official took a man out of the prison and sent him off, with no apprehensions of his not returning. One such messenger I remember to have been sent to Cattaro, in Austrian territory, with a sum of three thousand florins to be paid to the banker there, and he came back before night and reported at the prison. Jonine told me that one day, being in Cattaro, he was accosted by a Montenegrin, who begged for his intercession with the Prince to let him out of prison. “But,” said the Russian official, “you are no more in prison than I am; what do you mean?” “Oh,” said the man, “I have only come down for a load of skins for Voïvode So-and-so, but I must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje.” The prison was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal terms; and if, as sometimes happened, the guard was called away, any of the prisoners was ready to take his rifle and duties for the moment.

I have seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do. He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the Albanian raids, the agricultural and much other work fell necessarily to the women. When there were considerable flittings from Cettinje, and the amount of baggage to be carried down to Cattaro was large, it was always allotted to one of the most intelligent men to judge of the weight; and when it was a heavy package he said, “This is the load of a man,” or, if a light load, “This is for a woman,” many of whom were waiting, eager for the chance of gaining something by their labor. But no compensation will induce a Montenegrin to accept a work which is considered not the work of a man.

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.”