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.

Grebci was an abandoned village of the Herzegovinian population, robbed and maltreated even here within a rifle-shot of the Austrian territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the frontier. There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare. There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent of Duzi; Luka Petcovich, a Herzegovinian of the Montenegrin frontier, a tried Turk fighter; and the fighting popes of three villages of Orthodox Christians, Bogdan Simonich, Minje, and Milo. There was a small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux, one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer, ten Russians, and a few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship’s biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before. The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable. We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed. In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of victory permitted by the circumstances.

The Italians sang songs, and the whole band made merry till far into the night, when the correspondents, the honored guests, to be served with the best of the accommodations, were shown to the abandoned house of the captain of the village, a stone-built hut, the only one of two stories, which gave us a board floor to sleep on in the upper story, garnished with a bundle of straw for each of us, on which we lay down to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering, and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the first daylight came we turned out and made our way back to Ragusa.

Dissensions and mutual recriminations followed the defeat of Utovu, Peko openly expressing his disgust with the insurgents of the plain, who were braver when there was no enemy than when the fighting was imminent, and he marched off to a position in the hilly country nearer the Montenegrin frontier, leaving Ljubibratich with the men of the low country. The lull brought into action that Shefket Pasha who, the following year, inaugurated the “Bulgarian atrocities,” and who, declining to attack the band of Peko, came to vent his prowess on the people of the Popovo plain, of whom about five thousand had returned from exile in Dalmatia under the guarantee of the Turkish authorities of freedom from molestation on resuming their ordinary vocations. These were all Catholics, and the Catholics of Herzegovina and Bosnia have always been submissive, even to all the rigors of the Turkish rule, while the Orthodox Christians have been the rebels, the popes being generally the captains in time of war. Shefket, disregarding the guarantees of his government, marched on the villages of Popovo, killed or carried away prisoners all the men who did not escape again over the frontier, and allowed the bashi-bazouks to plunder and ravage. Male children were killed with the men; and the women, abandoning everything they could not carry, returned to Austrian territory, where I visited them to get the facts of the matter.

The result was that I decided to go to Mostar and lay the facts before the consuls, who had been charged to form a commission to investigate and report on the state of things in Herzegovina. I was joined by the correspondent of “Le Temps” and a Belgian engineer engaged on the new road beyond Seraievo, and we engaged a courageous coachman to drive us to the capital of Herzegovina, for timid people would not venture to make the journey, such was the anarchy of the country. As far as Metcovich we were in Austrian territory, but there we fell into the Asiatic order of things, meeting a frontier guard of ragged Turkish regulars, to whom the visas on our passports seemed of small account, in view of their evident desire to regard us as enemies; and all along the road to Mostar we had the scowling faces of the native Mussulmans bent on us as we passed, and the few Christians we saw wore an air of harelike timidity.

The city of Mostar is one of the most picturesque I have ever seen. At that time its dirt, decay, and generally unkempt appearance added to the picturesqueness, but not to the comfort. We got shelter at a khan, whose owner hardly knew if he dared admit a Christian guest; but the authority of the English consul, Mr. Holmes, reassured him, and we were admitted to the society of more fleas than I had considered possible at that time of the year. I had, however, provided myself with an ample supply of the Dalmatian product known as “flea powder,” the triturated leaves of the red camomile which grows in great perfection all over the mountains of Dalmatia and Montenegro, as if nature had foreseen that it would be especially needed there, and I slept in comparative immunity, though my prior experiences in hostelry had never given me an adequate understanding of the khan filth and discomfort.

I found that the consuls had all been fully informed of the general state of the country and the treachery exercised by the Turkish commanders, and Holmes told me that he had reported to the ambassador at Constantinople what he had learned, and that his report had been sent back with orders to make it less unfavorable to the Turks. Holmes (later Sir William Holmes, the distinction being well deserved for the courage and honesty with which, though strongly Turcophile in his tendencies, he exposed the abuses) said to me, relating this fact, “What can I do? I tell him what I know to be the facts as I have learned them, and he wants me to change them to make the report more favorable to the Turks!” I put his case before the public in the “Times,” and the honest fellow reaped the reward he deserved, though against the will of his ambassador.

Here I met again an old Cretan friend, Server Pasha, sent to try the same silly, futile tactics which so failed in Crete, i.e. offering the insurgents elaborate paper reforms in exchange for actual submission. He reminded me of the reply of the local commandant of the army at Mostar when one of the consuls remonstrated at the authorities having taken no action in a case of peculiarly brutal assassination in the city of Mostar, the author of which had not even been arrested. The Colonel Bey replied, astonished, to the indignant consul, “Why, haven’t we made a report?” The case was rather a peculiar one: a young Mussulman, having received a present of a new rifle, went out into the suburbs, and, seeing a Christian boy gathering the grapes from his mother’s vineyard, took a pot shot at him and shot him through the body. The young assassin was carried in triumph about the town on the shoulders of his playmates, and was never in any way punished for the crime. I had the story from the surgeon who attended the Christian boy, and from Mr. Holmes. I took a keen delight in illuminating the intelligent mind of Server Pasha as to the true condition of the country, telling him what I had seen and reported to the “Times;” and, as he knew me well, and that I was trustworthy in my reports, for he knew how A’ali Pasha had regarded me, he was in a curious state of mental distress. On his report to Constantinople, the consul-general at Ragusa, an Italian Levantine called Danish Effendi, whom I had also known at Syra in the old days, was ordered to make an investigation into the Popovo atrocities, and, being under the eyes of a large body of correspondents and a Christian public, he reported confirming my report.

Our return to Ragusa was not entirely free from excitement, for the indigenous Mussulman had less avidity for prey he saw going into the trap, Mostar, than for that which he saw escaping, and we had to face small predatory detachments of bashi-bazouks raiding in the country we passed through, who looked at us with eyes of fire, and muttered in no doubtful language, interpreted by my colleague of “Le Temps,” who knew Turkish, what they would be glad to do with us. As we sat eating our lunch in the shelter of a hovel by the roadside, while the horses were baiting, a party of the fanatics watched us with growing malignity and a truculent interchange of sentiments of an evidently unfriendly nature. To puzzle them as to our status, I took the pains to repeat in conversation with my colleague the formula of adherence to the faith as it is in Islam, a scrap of Arabic I had learned in Crete, the repetition of which, according to the rite, is equivalent to the recognition of Mahomet and his teachings. The effect on them was curious, and, though they evidently did not consent to regard us as of the true faith, they as evidently were puzzled, and we went our way unmolested; but I felt more at my ease, I am willing to admit, when we passed the last Turkish post on the road.