THE TAKING OF NIKSICH

To the Prince the siege of Niksich was like a game of chess played by cable, a move a day. But even this brought progress, and, when we had taken the outlying blockhouses, one by one, and there remained only the citadel, a flimsy fortress, mainly, I should judge, the work of the Servian kings, all that remained to accomplish was the bombardment of its walls, which became a sort of spectacle, to which we went day after day to watch the effect of the fire, as we should have done with a game of skittles. I climbed up on the top of a neighboring mountain, and, with my field-glass, inspected the town. Women went and came with their water-pitchers on their heads, moving in serene tranquillity, without quickening a step, and the life of the place seemed absolutely undisturbed by the danger, as if shells did not burst. Now and then one of the houses caught fire and varied the show; the Turkish return fire was mainly directed at the batteries where the great Russian guns were posted, and the Montenegrins used to sit on the rocks around, utterly heedless of the Turkish fire, despising cover. Finally a shell fell and exploded in the midst of a group of men, and, for the time, cover was made compulsory by order of the Prince. But the rank and file grew impatient, and demanded an attack with such insistence that the Prince was obliged to move. There were two steep ridges to the west of the city, crowned by strong stone breastworks and held by considerable detachments of regulars, being positions of supreme importance, as they commanded the redoubts on that side from a distance of 300 to 500 yards. The Prince gave the assault of one to a battalion of Montenegrins, and the other to the Herzegovinian auxiliaries.

There was in our camp a young German officer who had been under a shadow, and had been sent away to retrieve his reputation for courage. He came to Montenegro to earn a decoration, and begged the Prince to let him go with the Montenegrin battalion. At the foot of each ridge was an outwork which had first to be taken by assault, from across the open, and which was taken in the early twilight, the Turks seeking refuge in the redoubt above. The Montenegrin force reversed the works they had taken, and a desultory rifle fire went on till it was too dark to see the sights of the rifles. We, the spectators, were assigned posts to see the spectacle as at the theatre, and went to them just after sundown. The straggling fire of the early twilight stopped, and there was an unbroken silence and immobility which lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and until everything had become vague and indefinable in the deepening twilight, when we heard the signal, given by a trumpet call, and instantly the steep sides of the two ridges were crawling with gray shadows, and a terrific fire burst out from the redoubts at the top, lasting for hardly ten minutes, when it as suddenly ceased; and then, after a brief pause, the Montenegrin trumpet sounded from the summit of their ridge to tell that the work was done. We trooped back to our tents and to supper, and presently came in our little German friend, unharmed and exultant. His account was graphic. The Montenegrins had taken the outwork, working up on hand and knee, crawling and firing from such cover as they could find until the Turks broke and escaped to the summit, and the Montenegrins lay close behind the wall they had taken. When the trumpet sounded they threw their rifles down, drew their sword bayonets, and made a rush with the naked steel. The fire broke out from the redoubt above, said our little German, with a roar that was absolutely appalling; it was as if the sky were woven with whistling missiles, and but for very shame, seeing the rage of combat in the men around him, he would have lain down in overmastering panic. But no man halted, and the race between the two battalions was won by the Montenegrins only by a minute, and they poured over the wall of the redoubts, the Turks who could escape going out at the rear as their assailants poured in. When it comes to this final charge, the Montenegrin always leaves his gun behind and trusts only to the cold steel.

The next morning a flag of truce came to ask for terms, and the town surrendered on condition of the garrison going out with their arms and their private property. We went out to see them defile past the Prince and his staff. The poor fellows were in rags, and the bundles they carried on their backs contained everything they had in the world. Wives and children in numbers followed or preceded, and to our attempts to show them little kindnesses they shrank from us as if we had been wolves, the children generally howling with fear when we offered them a biscuit or a coin. One of our battalions escorted them through the narrows of the Duga, and, when they reached the wild and bosky gorge which makes its strongest position, the women stopped in a paralysis of panic, asking if this was the place where they were to be butchered, so completely had the Turkish authorities impressed on them the fiction of infallible slaughter for all who fell into the hands of the Montenegrins. The Prince gave the inhabitants four days to choose whether they would stay and become his subjects or take all their possessions and go to Albania. The most had decided to stay, when word was sent them from Spuz that all who accepted the protection of the Prince would be expelled and have all their property confiscated when the Turks returned, and many were frightened into revocation of their submission. Some were as irreconcilable as wolves, and would not endure conversation with us. I found a little fellow, about five or six, pasturing a lamb in the outskirts of the town, and tried, with the aid of the interpreter, to enter into conversation with him, but to no effect. He repelled every advance, and, when I offered him a piastre, he refused it with a savage dignity, saying that he had money of his own and did not want mine.

We took an immense booty in provisions, artillery (nineteen guns), tents, and war material, left by Suleiman in the expectation of returning after he had made the conquest of Montenegro. Ammunition there was none, for the artillery had been supplied with old muzzle-loading pistol and other cartridges broken up for the last weeks of the siege. And so ended the contest of four hundred years.

The easy terms accorded by the Prince to the garrison of Niksich brought their compensation a little later, when, the liberated garrison being besieged anew in the impregnable fortress of Spizza dominating the road from Dalmatia to Antivari, they gave in without a serious defense, satisfied with the honors of war. It was clear, from the testimony I was able to collect from Turkish deserters and prisoners, that the obstinate defense of the garrisons under siege was oftener due to the desperation inspired by the assurance of the Turkish authorities themselves, that no quarter would be given to those who surrendered, than to the bellicose ardor. A captain of the Turkish nizams, who had commanded one of the little fortresses beyond Niksich, and who surrendered to Socica when he knew that his tower was undermined and would be blown up in a minute if he did not surrender, declined to be released, as he knew that, whatever might happen to his men, he would be shot for surrendering, and no account taken of the necessity of saving the life of his men, to say nothing of his own. The method of Socica in attacking those towers, which were of stone, without any artillery, was to construct a wooden tower on wheels, strong enough to resist rifle balls, and which, moved by the men inside, approached the fortress, till actually in contact, when a mine was put under the wall and the garrison was summoned to surrender.

Our Albanian captain preferred the climate of Cettinje to that of Podgoritza, and there I made his acquaintance. He had not received a penny of his pay for forty months, and was in rags and shoeless in the depth of winter, when I knew him. I bought him some shoes and second-hand clothes, and interested the Prince in his case, so that finally he was given a place on the staff and regular pay. The gratitude of the poor fellow was embarrassing. He begged me to take him as a body servant, declaring himself ready to go with me to the world’s end, and I could hardly make him understand that a servant would be a burden to me which I could not afford. He said to one of the Montenegrin officers, “When I say my prayers for myself I always ask God to be good to that English gentleman.” As with most of the men of his race whom I have made the acquaintance of, his native faculties were of a high order. The Albanians are quick, ingenious, and industrious, and are the best workmen in the finer industrial arts of the Balkans, gold and silver workers of remarkable skill, dividing the blacksmithing with the gypsy, but the best and indeed the only armorers of that world. We had a number of them in the camp at Niksich, refugees from the tribes on our frontier, and I found them most interesting companions, generally speaking Italian and Serb as well as their own dialects. Their conservatism is something almost inexplicable. A friend who had campaigned with them told me that when they sacked a village their first quest was always for old iron, which they valued more than gold and silver, an estimation which can only be the heredity of an age when iron was the article of the highest utility, for now it is easy of acquisition everywhere about their country. They reckon their ancestry from the mother, and when my Cretan cavass, Hadji Houssein, spoke of his home, it was always as his “mother’s house.”

Niksich settled under Montenegrin rule, and order established, the Prince moved his headquarters to Bilek, a fortress which commanded the roads from Ragusa to the interior of Herzegovina, and whence he could dominate all the southern sections of that province, protecting his frontier. There was, as usual, no road for wheels, only a rough bridle-path, and the mobility of the Montenegrins under those conditions was remarkable. They carried the thirty-two-pound breech-loaders on fir poles run through the guns and supported on the men’s shoulders, faster than our horses could walk, and the artillery rapidly distanced the staff and corps diplomatique, not even a rear guard remaining with us. In company with one of the aides I rode on under the impression that headquarters were behind us, until we got lost in the labyrinth of paths running about the forest, and we lay down under a tree to rest and wait for the staff to overtake us. Here one of the perianiks found us and brought us to the Prince, who had gone ahead on a blind road, with half a dozen perianiks, two or three sirdars, and the diplomats. He had tried to show his knowledge of the country and lost his way; so, coming to a pretty dell which took his fancy, he ordered a halt and preparations to pass the night, and there we found him.

We had no tents; the rendezvous for the night had been at Tupani, several miles from where we were, and the division commanders were with the men and had no communication with us. We had eaten an early breakfast, and had brought no food; the only blankets were those of the Prince. The perianiks gathered wood and made a fire, round which we gathered, for the night set in sharp, it being the middle of September in a high mountain country. One of the men had taken the precaution to put two or three pieces of bread in his haversack before starting, and this was divided between us, and I made my supper on this and some wild plums I found growing there. Later the men went out to forage and found a farmhouse, where they got straw and milk, with a little sheep’s-milk cheese. The proprietress, aroused by the invasion, came down on us in a veritable visitation, furious at our burning her wood. She abused the Prince and all the company in the most insulting terms, and was finally placated only by a liberal compensation for her wood. I spread my bundle of straw under the wild plum tree, and, covered by my ulster, tempted sleep. I dozed until the ants found me out, when, unable to lie quiet under the formication, I got up and passed hours walking up and down till I was so tired that I almost fell asleep walking; then I lay down again and slept for an hour, but the cold and the ants awoke me again, and I spent the rest of the night by the camp-fire. Meanwhile the army collected at Tupani knew nothing of the Prince, and, with the early dawn, patrols were sent off in every direction to beat up the country in search of him. Had the Turks been on the lookout they might have gobbled up the Prince and his diplomats without difficulty. Beaching the general rendezvous, I decided that a more active occupation than following the tactics of the Prince would suit me better, and I turned my horse’s head towards Niksich again. Another tedious siege like that of Niksich was not to my taste, and I decided to explore the remoter provinces, and if possible go to Wassoivich, the only corner of the great Dushanic empire into which the Turk had never penetrated even for a raid, where, under the rugged peaks of the Kutchi Kom, survived the best representatives of ancient custom and life.