THE WAR OF 1876

I returned to Montenegro in the following June, after the diplomacy of Europe had vainly and discordantly discussed mediation all the winter. An armistice had suspended hostilities, but the Turks continued the concentration of troops on the frontiers of the principality, north and south, and refused the conditions of the Prince for a peaceful solution. Everything waited for the acceptance by Servia of the programme for the war which was to be declared by the principalities against Turkey. The official declaration of war took place on the 2d of July, and on the 3d the Prince set out with flying banners for the conquest of the Herzegovina. My orders being to remain in touch with the telegraph, I had to resign the pleasure of the campaign, and I passed the time in studying up accessories. The Prince started directly for Mostar, accompanied by the Austrian military attaché, Colonel Thoemel, one of the most intensely anti-Montenegrin Austrian officials I ever met. If the Austrian government had intended to inflict on the Prince the most humiliating censor in its service, and make the relations between the governments as bad as possible, they could not have chosen an agent more effective than Thoemel. In his hatred of Montenegro and enjoyment of the fortiter in re, he entirely threw off the suaviter in modo. He enjoyed intensely every petty humiliation he could inflict on the Prince, who, with the greatest tact, never noticed his rudeness. The maintenance of good relations with Austria tasked the Prince’s diplomacy to the utmost. As I saw nothing of the campaign, I will dispose of it by saying that, when the Prince had nearly reached Mostar, the colonel informed him officially that if he took Mostar he would be driven out of it by the Austrian army, and, after a slight skirmish on the hills commanding the city, the Prince took the road towards Trebinje. Meanwhile the operations on the southern frontier, under the direction of the amiable and competent Bozo Petrovich, remained for my observation.

One of the chiefs of clans who were waiting at Cettinje for the plan of the southern campaign was Marko Millianoff, hereditary chief of the Kutchi, an independent Slav tribe on the borders of Albania, generally allied in the frontier operations with the Montenegrins. The Turks desired particularly to subdue this people in the outset of the campaign, as their territory commanded the upper road from Podgoritza to Danilograd, and hostilities commenced with an attack on them. While waiting I made the acquaintance of Marko, whom I found to be one of the most interesting characters I met in Montenegro. His courage and resource in stratagem were proverbial in the principality. I had a capital Ross field-glass, and amused him one day by showing its powers. He had never seen a telescope before, and his delight over it was childlike. “Why,” he exclaimed in rapture, “this is worth a thousand men.” “Then take it,” I said, “and I hope it will prove worth a thousand men.” His force of 2500 men was then blockading the little fortress of Medun, a remotely detached item of the defensive system of Podgoritza, and on the next day he set out for his post.

I saw him some months later, and he told me that when the great sortie from Podgoritza to relieve Medun came in view of the blockading force, though at a distance of several miles, his men declared that they could not fight that immense army, which filled the valley with its numbers and had the appearance of a force many times greater than their own. Marko looked at it through the glass and found it to be mainly a provision train, for Medun was on the verge of starvation, the garrison having “shaken out the last grain of rice from their bags,” to use the expression of the moment. When Marko’s men found the actual number of fighting men in the Turkish sortie, they decided to fight it out. They didn’t mind ten to one, they said, but much more than that had appeared to confront them. The Turks, commanded by Mahmoud Pasha, a good Hungarian general, were about 20,000 men, as I afterwards learned from various sources, including the English consulate at Scutari, comprising 7000 Zebeks, barbarians from the country back of Smyrna, accustomed to the yataghan, and supposed to be qualified opponents of the Montenegrins in the employment of the cold steel. Marko fought retreating from the morning until about 2 P.M., when the Turks stopped to eat, having driven the Montenegrin force back and toward Medun about three miles. When the Turks had eaten and began to smoke, Millianoff gave the word to charge; and though the Turks had built thirteen breastworks to fall back on as they advanced, they yielded to the vigorous assault of the first line, and the Montenegrins swept through the whole series with a rush, not permitting the Turks to form again or gather behind one, and drove those who escaped under the walls of Podgoritza, leaving 4700 dead on the way, for no prisoners were taken. Millianoff said, when I saw him again, “Your glass saved us the battle,” which was virtually the preservation of the independence of the tribe, and possibly the decision of the campaign on that side. The fortress was obliged, a little later, to surrender, and in the subsequent siege of Niksich the artillery taken at Medun served a very good purpose, being heavier than anything the Montenegrins had.

I had secured for correspondent with the Prince the services of his Swiss secretary, an excellent fellow by the name of Duby; and, as all the interest of the war for the moment lay in the campaign of the Prince against Mostar and its consequences, I arranged to have my news at Ragusa by telegraph, and there I went for the time being. On the 28th of July I received at 11 P.M. the news of the battle of Vucidol, in which the army of Mukhtar Pasha was routed and nearly destroyed, Mukhtar himself barely escaping by the speed of his horse, entering the gate of Bilek only a hundred yards in advance of his foremost pursuer, his wounded horse falling in the gateway. Of his two brigadiers, one, Selim Pasha, a most competent and prudent general, was killed, and the other, Osman Pasha, the Circassian, taken prisoner. He lost all his artillery, and thirteen out of twenty-five battalions of regulars, two hundred prisoners being taken; but while these were en route to Cettinje they became alarmed and showed a disposition to be refractory, and were put to death at once by the escort. The ways of warfare in those parts were, in spite of all the orders of the Prince, utterly uncivilized, the Montenegrin wounded being always put to death if they fell into the hands of the enemy, and no quarter being given in battle by the Montenegrins, though Turks who surrendered in a siege were kept as prisoners during the war. I had seen Mukhtar at Ragusa during the conference at the time of the armistice, and he bore out in his personal appearance the description which Osman Pasha gave of him, dreamy, fanatical, ascetic, who gave his confidence to no one, and who said, when Selim proposed a council of war before Vucidol, “If my fez knew what was in my head I would burn it,” and refused to listen to the cautionary measures Selim advised preliminary to the attack. The ascetic and the fanatic was written in his face. Returning to Cettinje, I found Osman there a prisoner on parole, and at my intercession he was permitted to accompany me to Ragusa, where I returned after a few days, life in Montenegro being intolerably dull except during the fighting.

The next movement on the part of the Turks, which was expected to be one by Dervish Pasha, from the base of Podgoritza towards Cettinje, called me into the field again. We took position along the heights of Koumani, on the verge of the great table-land which intervenes between Rieka and Danilograd, and from which we could see the Turkish camps spread out on the plain below us; and if the Turks had but known where we were, they might have thrown their shells from the blockhouses in the plain into our camp. There was no attack for the moment, and the scouts of the Montenegrins used to amuse themselves by arousing the Turkish camps in the night or by stealing the horses and mules from the guards set over them. A band of seven stole, during this suspension of operations, forty horses and brought them into the camp, and one, more cunning and light-footed than the rest, stole the pasha’s favorite horse from the tent where he was guarded by two soldiers sleeping at the entrance, and brought him to the Prince at Koumani. He had to take the precaution of wrapping the creature’s hoofs in rags before bringing him out of the tent. When the object was to stir the Turks out of their rest, a half-dozen men would crawl up to the stone wall which they invariably threw up around the camp, and lay their rifles on it, for there was never a sentry set, and fire rapidly into the tents as many shots as they could before rousing the camp, and then scatter and run. The whole battalion would turn out and continue firing in every direction over the country for half an hour, while the artillery, as soon as the guns could be manned, followed the example, and almost every night we were roused from our sleep by the booming of the guns.

The early collapse of the Servian defense led, after some negotiations, to a truce, and diplomacy took up the matter, and in September I went home again. The “Times” correspondence had given the Montenegrin question serious importance in England, and during the winter I had several opportunities to discuss it with men of influence, amongst whom were Gladstone and the Marquis of Bath, who invited me to pass some days at Longleat to inform him more completely on it. During my last stay in Montenegro I had been informed by Miss Irby one of the women who distinguish their English race by their angelic charity and works for humanity, and who, being engaged in benevolent work in Bosnia, became one of my firm allies that reports had been put in circulation in London against my probity and the trustworthiness of my correspondence, imputing to me indeed a conduct which would have excluded me from honorable society. This was the work of the pro-Turkish party, enraged by the sympathy evoked by my correspondence on behalf of the Montenegrins, and Sir Henry Elliott had made himself the mouthpiece of it. Mr. Gladstone, having become warmly interested in the little mountain principality by my correspondence, had taken its case up in a strong review article, and had persuaded Tennyson to devote a sonnet to it. He was, as he himself informed me, warned by Sir Henry Elliott not to trust to my letters or to employ them as authority for his work, for Sir Henry said that I was considered in the Levant, where I was well known, to be an infamous and untrustworthy character. Mr. Gladstone, therefore, though he used my facts, referred them to the authority of a second-hand version. Fortunately for me and my work, Professor Freeman had heard the reports in question, and knowing me personally, and taking the passionate interest he did in the war against the Turks, applied himself to the investigation of the tales, and satisfied himself and Gladstone that they were simple libels, without a shadow of foundation, and even had never been heard of until they were promulgated in London. They were the coinage of political passion.

Gladstone sent me word through Freeman that he wished me to call on him to receive personally his apologies for having believed and been influenced by them, and I went to see him as he requested for that purpose. He told me at the same time that though he did not usually read the “Times,” he had taken it to read my letters. He asked me many questions about the principality, showing his great interest, as well as his political acumen, and amongst the questions was one which, at the time, gave me great thought, and still retains its significance. It was, “Have the Montenegrins any institutions on which a national future can be built?” He was desirous of knowing if Montenegro could be made the nucleus of a great south Slavonic organization. I was unable to give him any assurance of the existence of anything beyond the primitive and patriarchal state which fitted its present position, in which a personal government by a wise prince is sufficient to reach all the needs of the population. And to-day I am of the opinion that a greatly enlarged Montenegro would run the danger of becoming a little Russia, in which the best ruler would be lost in the intricacies of the intrigues and personal ambitions that facilitate corruption and injustice, and where the worst ruler might easily become a curse to all his neighbors. Gladstone’s good-will had its issue later in the enforced restitution to Montenegro of the district of Antivari and Dulcigno, which the Montenegrin army had taken, but evacuated, pending the disposition of the congress which after S. Stefano regulated the treaty of peace.

Lord Bath, beside the political question, was interested in the religious situation of the principality, which has maintained its national existence and character through its form of ecclesiastical organization, that of the Orthodox faith. He had sent me on two occasions considerable sums of money for the wounded and the families of the killed in the war, and always took a vivid interest in its fortunes. He repeated to me a conversation he had had at Longleat with Beaconsfield, in which he had asked the minister what interest England had in Montenegro that induced the government to give it aid and countenance, as it did after a certain stage in the war. Beaconsfield had replied that “England had no interest whatever in Montenegro, but that the letters in the ‘Times’ had created such an enthusiasm for the principality that the government had been obliged to take it into account.” The Prince was fully informed on this score, and he and all his people recognized the debt they owed the “Times,” and, as an exception to all my political experience, they have shown themselves a grateful people, and Prince as well as people have always shown their gratitude in all ways that I could permit. The Greeks almost unanimously became hostile to me when I became the advocate of a Slavonic emancipation, and of the Hellenic friends I made while in Crete, Tricoupi alone of men of rank remained my personal friend after the Montenegrin campaigns.

Amongst the Russian fellow campaigners there were several with whom I contracted friendships which endure, chief among them being Wassiltchikoff, the head of the Red Cross staff, who was also dispenser of the bountiful contributions of the Russian committees for the wounded and the families of the killed. I must confess a strong liking for the Russian individual, and I have hardly known a Russian whom I did not take to, in spite of a looseness in matters of veracity in which they are so unlike the Anglo-Saxon in general. I think that the time is coming when the evolution of the Russian character will make the race the dominant one in Europe; and that, when the vices inherent in a people governed despotically have been outgrown, they will develop a magnificent civilization, which, in poetry, in music, and in art, even, may distance the West of to-day. But in the crude and maleficent despotic form of government which now obtains, they are likely to menace for a long time the well-being of the world. The struggle between the German and the Slav, however long it may be postponed, is inevitable, and the defeat of the German secures the Russian domination of Europe. Napoleon’s alternative, “Cossack or Republican,” is substantially prophetic, though the terms are more probably “Despotic or Constitutional.” I have no animosity toward Russia, but any advance of her influence in the Balkans seems to me to be a battle gained by her in this conflict. Established at Constantinople, her next stage would be Trieste; and the ultimate Russification of all the little Slavonic nationalities of the Balkans, of which she is now the champion, becomes inevitable. The only safeguard against this is the maintenance of Austria as the suzerain power in the peninsula.

But, for the personal Russian, as I have said, I have always had a thorough liking, and all through the Montenegrin campaigns I held those who were there as warm friends. The official Russians were not, however, popular in Montenegro, the people possessing an unusual degree of independence, and the Russians attaching more importance to their aid and coöperation than the circumstances made it politic to show; and Jonine, who became minister-resident at Cettinje, was, perhaps, the most unpopular foreigner there, while Monson, who became English agent there, was, both with prince and public, the most popular. The entry into the alliance with Russia made little difference in the sentiments of the people, and even the Prince resisted, in an extraordinary and even impolitic degree, the Russian suggestions in the conduct of the war.