was only a plan and a hope. Of all the work done by American children
in Europe, this school is most beautiful to me. It was not much the
Junior Red Cross did in Albania--only a few months of Frances Hardy’s
house for refugee children in Scutari, only a little medical work that
stopped too soon--but it did build the Vocational School, and Albania
will never forget it. Half of the country’s little income goes for the
1,100 schools started since 1912, but none of them can be equipped
or staffed like the Vocational School. It opened in July, with sixty
boys to learn English. For there are no technical books written in
Albanian, and Albanian was the only language the boys knew. Three
months later they were speaking, reading, and writing English, and the
first school year began. In March, when we came to Tirana, they were
the finest upstanding lot of youngsters that ever made a teacher proud,
and our arrival was celebrated by an evening’s entertainment, for which
the boys extemporised little plays in English, political parodies so
witty that they brought tears of mirth to the eyes. I do not think the
record of those boys is equaled anywhere, and to find Rexh among them
was the happy ending to the story.
“And now Ahmet Bey is Minister of the Interior! Who is chief of the
Mati, then?”
“His mother is chief when he is away, Mrs. Lane.”
“Is he a good Minister of the Interior?”
“He works very hard. I think he did not have much schooling. He came
from the court of Abdul Hamid when he was sixteen--you remember the
_comitadj_ told you--and he has been fighting ever since. He came to
Tirana last December when there was the strike.”
“No, Rexh! A strike? In Tirana?”
“It is a long story, Mrs. Lane. If you would have a coffee with me, I
would tell it all.”
We left the others wandering down the Durazzo road and back, and sat
at a little table beneath a plane tree by the white arches of the
café. A waiter brought us cups of Turkish coffee, and while the crowd
went slowly past us and bursts of Albanian song came through the open
windows and a great yellow moon rose behind the white minaret, Rexh
told the tale of the first strike in Albanian history.
“It was at the time of the Merdite trouble. I do not know what you have
heard of the Republic of the Merdite; it was a Serbian plan to get the
Merdite country. The people were starving, and the Serbs promised them
corn, and I think there was money for the Merdite chiefs, because some
of them signed a paper that said there was a Republic of the Merdite
and the Serbs sent that paper to Europe. Then other chiefs fought
these chiefs that signed it, and the Serbs came in, and Ahmet Bey Mati
was sent with our soldiers to fight the Serbs. It is five days to the
Merdite, when the trails are good.
“You know, Mrs. Lane, Albania has no king. We have four regents,
that we call quarter-kings. We laugh when we say it. ‘There goes a
quarter-king,’ we say. There are the Ministers elected by Parliament,
and their chief, the Prime Minister; they are the real kings. They do
things, and then afterward the quarter-kings have to say, ‘Yes, that
is what we would have done.’
“While Ahmet Bey was gone to the Merdite with all our soldiers, there
were only three quarter-kings in Tirana. One was gone to Geneva; he
was a good one. One that was here was a good one. One was a friend of
Castoldi, the Italian. No good Albanian, Mrs. Lane, is a friend of
Italy. And the last quarter-king, he was from Dibra, and wanted to
fight the Serbs.
“And while there were no soldiers here, secretly at midnight thirty
men with rifles came into Tirana, and went to the house of Pandeli
Evangeli, the Prime Minister. They went in over the walls and through
the windows. They pointed their rifles at Pandeli and said, ‘Resign.’
So he resigned. Then he called for a horse and went home to Valona.
“In the morning there was no Prime Minister. And Parliament was not in
session. Do you understand, Mrs. Lane?”
I understood. Thus easily--if surmise could be believed--Italy had
captured the Albanian government. Two of the three quarter-kings
controlled the situation, and one of them was a Gheg. If he were given
his head, Italy had only to await the outbreak of violence between the
chiefs who wanted war on Serbia and those who were clamoring for peace,
and then march in with her authority from the League of Nations to
bring law and order into lawless Albania. “What happened, Rexh?”
“But you have guessed it. The one good quarter-king could do nothing,
and resigned. The other two made a government to fight Serbia. Hassan
Prishtini of Kossova was the new Prime Minister. Then all Albania was
like a nest of hornets stirred with a stick. The men of Parliament went
riding from their villages to Elbassan, and Prishtini sent word to
Elbassan to kill them. Then all the men of Korcha went with rifles to
Elbassan to fight for Parliament. Troops with machine guns were coming
from Scutari to fight Prishtini. And, Mrs. Lane, there was an Italian
gunboat at Durazzo. Everywhere all men, Toshks and Ghegs, were saying,
what could they do to save the Constitution? But no one knew how to do
it.
“Hassan Prishtini said, ‘The Constitution does not make Albania free;
we will make Albania really free. Albanians are not cowards and will
not be ruled by cowards,’ Hassan Prishtini said. ‘We have nothing to do
with Leagues of Nations that have sold us. We will fight the Serbs and
make Kossova free; we will take back our lands of Hoti and Gruda and
Castrati. The Italians do not dare touch us. We drove them once from
Valona; we can do it twice.’ That was what Hassan Prishtini said.
“‘I think this will be a good year for pears,’ said the bear. ‘Why?’
said the other bear. And the first bear replied, ‘Because I like them.’
“I forgot, Mrs. Lane, that people do not talk that way in English. I
forgot I was not talking in Albanian. In English you would say it:
Hassan Prishtini thought that he could do what he wanted to do because
he wanted to do it. But that is not thinking.
“That very first morning, there was the strike. The two men that can
make the telephone work, and the man that clicks the telegraph, and
the chauffeur of the government automobile, and the cook and the
coffee maker of Government House, and the guard at the door, and
all the secretaries of all the Ministers--they all went to the Café
International, and had a meeting. Then they walked from the café to
Government House and back, singing the song of free Albania. After that
they did nothing. They sat and drank coffee. I do not know if you have
ever seen a strike, but that is what it is. They did not do anything,
and there was no telephone, no telegraph, no messenger, no coffee,
nothing at all, for the new government.
“And Hassan Prishtini could not do anything. The new government sat in
Government House. Everybody else sat in the cafés. Elbassan did not
fight Parliament, because it could not get Tirana on the telephone.
Hassan Prishtini’s men in the mountains did not march anywhere, because
no orders came. All Albania thought something terrible was happening in
Tirana, and wasn’t it funny? Because nothing at all was happening.
“On the third day, Ahmet Bey came with twelve hundred fighting men of
the Mati--Catholics, from northern Mati. They came in, and they did not
do anything. But there were no other fighting men in Tirana. So Hassan
Prishtini resigned, and when the Parliament came to Tirana it made a
new government, and Ahmet Bey Mati was Minister of the Interior. And
that was the end of the strike. There are songs about it, Mrs. Lane, if
you want me to get them for you.”
It seemed to me the most remarkable tale of a political crisis that I
had ever heard, and for some time I considered it in silence, getting
the full delightful flavor of it. The moon and the minaret were a
Japanese print against the turquoise sky, and somewhere a mandolin
tinkled and a voice sang the “Mountain Song”:
“How beautiful is the month of May,
When we go with the flocks to the mountains!”
Then a discrepancy in Rexh’s story struck me. “If the Merdite is five
days from Tirana, and Ahmet was fighting the Serbs there, how did he
come to Tirana in three days? How did he know there was trouble in
Tirana?”
“Ahmet is a Gheg, Mrs. Lane. A Gheg always expects trouble. When he
went into the mountains he left behind him men he could trust, hidden
in the woods by the telephone wires. There is a small round black
thing that can hear on a telephone wire--I do not know what you call
it. It is small, and has a wire that goes over the telephone wire; you
put it to your ear. Ahmet had got some of those from Vienna, and some
little mirrors, for the men he left behind him. In the morning after
Pandeli resigned, word went over the telephone to Elbassan to kill the
Parliament, and to some of Hassan Prishtini’s men to stay on the trails
to the Merdite and not let Ahmet get back to Tirana. Ahmet’s men heard
this, and with the little mirrors in the sunshine they telegraphed it
to the mountains, and other men telephoned it with their voices to
Ahmet. So he came secretly around Prishtini’s men, and came walking day
and night to Tirana. He left his men in the Merdite to hold the Serbs,
and took the twelve hundred fresh men from the Catholic part of the
Mati.”
“Ahmet is Mohammedan?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane. His family has been Mohammedan since Scanderbeg died.”
“In the morning I shall go to see Ahmet. He must be a remarkable man.”
Rexh considered this statement. “He is a good man, yes. We have a
saying in the mountains, Mrs. Lane. ‘Ask a thousand men, then follow
your own advice.’ I think that is what Ahmet does.”
* * * * *
I had interviewed, without exceptional enthusiasm, each member of the
Albanian Cabinet save Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati. But I am not,
in general, enthusiastic about the Ministers or members of Parliament
that I have met in any country. In democratic countries their
profession gives their minds a remarkable agility, like that of the
elephant on the rolling ball. The muscular development of the elephant
a-pilin’ teak in the slushy mushy creek has more interest for me.
This is a matter of personal taste. However, I am about to become so
enthusiastic about Ahmet Bey Mati that it seems well to mention that my
enthusiasms are few, and not excited either by statesmen or soldiers.
Perhaps six scientists and business men are my heroes. Why, then, after
three minutes of talk with Ahmet Bey Mati, did I add to that short list
this mountain chief of semisavage tribes, who certainly knew nothing
either of science or of modern business?
Government House in Tirana is an old residence, hurriedly converted
into offices. It stands at the end of a street, in a courtyard
surrounded by a high mud-brick wall rather badly broken at intervals.
A mountain man with a rifle sits at the big gate. Another guard, even
more gorgeous in white wool, scarlet jacket, and gold embroidery,
stands on the wooden porch. Inside, the bare wooden floors, partitions,
and stairways suggest a Middle Western American barn. Parliament Hall
is furnished with school desks for the members, and a red-covered
dais for the President, with the Scanderbeg flag above it, are bright
colors against whitewashed walls. The offices are nondescript with
overstuffed Italian furniture and fine Albanian rugs. Cigarettes are
on the desks, coffee is served to callers, and my feminine experience
of interviews was that facts must be fought for against a barrage of
French compliments.
We had been in Tirana two days and could not put a finger on any fact
to account for the distinct uneasiness we felt. We were tormented by
a wholly irrational feeling that, somehow, somewhere, something was
wrong. Everything we could see appeared to be all right, everyone
assured us that everything was all right. I went into Ahmet Bey’s
office prepared to exchange the elaborate forms of mountain courtesy
and to look at Ahmet, no more.
The office was bare. No overstuffed furniture, no rugs. Bare floor,
bare walls, an unpainted wooden table, and Ahmet. He was keen,
self-controlled, hard willed. That was the first impression. The second
was that he was the best-dressed man, in a European sense, that I had
seen for a long time. He was dressed like the successful American
business man who gives _carte blanche_ to a very good tailor and
forgets clothes. He rose, said, “_Tu njet jeta_” (“I am glad you have
come”), and while he said it he looked at me as a scientist looks at a
microscope slide. Then he offered me a chair, sat down, and added, “Can
I be of service to you, madame?”
The shock was such that my mind blinked. Then I said that I wished
to visit Mati and the Merdite, and had come to the Ministry of the
Interior to arrange for the trip. Ahmet offered me a cigarette, and
lighted it, and my mind waked to alertness, for I saw that he was
making time in which to choose his reply. There _was_ something wrong;
our feeling was right! I would trip him into giving me a clew.
Our eyes met as I thanked him for the cigarette, and I saw that he saw
that I knew he had been hesitating. Idiot that I was, to betray it, I
thought. And he said, “This is a difficult time in Albania, madame. I
cannot tell you whether you can go to the mountains or not. I cannot
discuss our difficulties with you to-day. In ten days’ time they will
be ended. I must ask you to wait ten days, perhaps less, certainly no
more. Then if you can come to see me again, I will tell you anything
you want to know. If it is possible for you to go into the mountains,
of course you will go as guest of the Albanian government.”
Everything had been said. He accompanied me to the door, said:
“Long may you live! Go on a smooth trail!” and held the door open,
simultaneously for me to go out and for the next caller to come in. The
door shut. And I said, “That is one of the few great men I have met.”
All that day, at intervals, I recalled that interview and marveled. How
had that man come from his background? From the leisurely, evasive,
allusive talks of the mountains, from the intricate subtleties of Abdul
Hamid’s court, where had he got that incisiveness, that direct, driving
force? It was genius, I said; nothing less. I went about asking, “Is
Ahmet Bey a patriot?” For if he were not, certainly he was one of the
most dangerous men in Albania.
I was told that he was a nephew of Essad Pasha, who sold Albania to
Serbia for the title of its king, and was assassinated by Albanians
in Paris. I was told that Ahmet had sold timber rights in the Mati to
Italians, but had later revoked the sale. I was told that he was a very
rich man, and that he held the forty thousand fighting men of the Mati
in his hand. I was told that the Serbs, in one of their 1921 raids, had
burned the Great House in the Mati, the house in which his family had
lived for five centuries. Nothing else, apparently, was known about him.
Walking that night at sunset time with all Tirana, we were surprised to
observe that the soldiers lounging around the fires in the courtyard of
their barracks were not the same soldiers who had been there the night
before. These were new men, recruits, and--by the pattern of their
trousers--men from the plains of the south. Raw peasant youths, they
looked. None of them carried rifles on their backs, and the few rifles
we saw were held awkwardly, as by unpracticed hands. Of course there
is a constant flow of recruits through Tirana, for as the government
disarms the mountaineers it endeavors to build up a trained citizen
army, on the Swiss plan. But we guessed, by the absence of the seasoned
soldiers, that there was battle, or danger of battle, somewhere else in
Albania.
Incredible, as we walked homeward under the white moon, that on this
spring night men could be killing one another. Incredible, in this
magic of moon and rippling water and a little owl calling love notes
from the dark cypress, that anywhere there was anything but peace. The
tall carved wooden gate of our courtyard was romantic in the shadow of
Government House; our little house was picturesque with black shadows
on white plaster; there was glamour everywhere.
“What’s that? Is that a mouse?” said Annette, through the darkness in
which we lay awake, watching the moonlight on the walls and breathing
the sweet spring air. We listened. Nothing. “I thought I heard
something--a sort of little crackling sound.”
“Listen,” I said, half an hour later. “What is that throbbing?”
Curiosity’s nagging at last got us from our beds. Kimono clad and in
slippers we went out into our courtyard. The throbbing came from an
engine; the engine that feeds the dynamo of Government House. Every
window blazed electric light. We looked at them in amazement; we looked
at our wrist watches under the moon. Ten o’clock. And we started when
the shadow of the wall beside us moved and spoke. “Long may you live,
_zonyas_! It will be very good if you go into your house.”
“_Por hene asht shum i mire_” (“But the moonlight is very good, too”),
I objected, and saw the moonlight glint on a rifle barrel. “Why is
Government House lighted? And why are you in our courtyard?”
“There are orders,” the man replied. “Ahmet Bey Mati has spoken. The
American _zonyas_ will go into their house.”
He would say nothing more, and there seemed indeed nothing else to do,
so we went. The sound that lifted us from our pillows once more was
one that I shall not forget, nor willingly hear again. It came through
the night like a supernatural thing of hate and fury and irresistible
power. We did not know what it was; we had no power to wonder what it
was; we heard it with an agony of fear, involuntary, uncontrollable as
the pain of a stripped nerve. I remember now that instant and eternity
of time, and cannot bear the memory. I had not known that even in
nightmare one could drop into such abysses of the human spirit. Then
Tirana seemed to explode like a bunch of giant firecrackers, and with
such relief as I cannot describe I cried: “Rifles! They’re taking
Tirana!” And we tumbled out of our beds and grasped wildly in the
darkness for our clothes.
Rifles are human possessions; rifles are solid things that at worst
can only kill. The sound of the rifles, multiplied a thousand times
by echoing courtyard walls, muffled and enabled us to bear that other
sound, still faintly heard through the uproar. “It’s only their war
cry,” we babbled to each other. “It’s the mountain men fighting. That’s
all it is.” Coherence came back to our minds. “It’s the Dibra,” I said.
“Dibra and the refugee Kossova men, come to take the government away
from the Toshks.” And we ran out into the courtyard.
The rest of that night was anticlimax. Bafflement. Weary and chilly, we
came back to our house at three o’clock. We had explored the courtyard,
finding only that the shadows were full of silent, waiting men. They
spoke little; they said, in reply to our questions, that they did
not know what was happening. We had ventured out of the courtyard
into Tirana, that low white town that, to the eye, seemed sleeping
in the moonlight, and to the ear was bedlam. Bullets were whizzing,
scattering white plaster, smashing tiles. But mosques and minarets,
arcaded streets, arched stone bridge, rippling water, were peaceful in
the moonlight. No human being seemed to be abroad, save us two, who
wandered like forsaken ghosts through the incredible clamor.
The windows of the Vocational School were alight, the American flag
was over the gate. We found the Americans making ready a midnight
luncheon in the kitchen, whose windows were barricaded against bullets.
Great Scott! they said, why hadn’t we stayed in bed? Have some baked
beans? We ate the beans and explained that we wanted to know what was
happening. Who knew what was happening, in Albania? said they, yawning.
Better go home to bed; time enough to find out in the morning what was
happening. So, weary and chilly, we went home to bed. The rifles were
still crackling like madly popping corn, tiles were still crashing from
roofs and plaster from walls, but the war cries were still. We slept
fitfully.
A tapping on our window sill roused us again. The moonlight was gone
from our wall, the open window was a square of paler darkness in the
darkness. “I beg your pardon, I sincerely beg your pardon,” said a
voice in French. “This is most unconventional, I know. But if you will
pardon the lateness of the hour, may I ask you to permit us to call?”
It was the voice of His Excellency Spiro Koleka, Minister of Public
Works.
He came in, accompanied by the secretary of the Prime Minister. We sat
up in our beds, coats around our shoulders, and told them where to find
chairs and cigarettes. They said that if we did not mind they would not
light the lamp. We asked what had occurred.
“_Rien, rien du tout, mesdames_,” said the Minister of Public Works.
“_Tout est tranquil._”
“The ancient Greeks had a saying,” began the secretary, gave us
that saying in Greek, and continued to speak for some time, not
uninterestingly, of Greek and other philosophers. The social tone of
that early morning call was impeccable. Good breeding required that
we maintain it. We sat exasperated in the dark, saying to ourselves
that we would gladly murder these two uncommunicative men. But we felt
that to ask them to leave the shelter of our house would be murder, in
cold fact. In the wan daylight of six o’clock they thanked us for our
hospitality, and went.
Tirana was peaceful in the morning sunlight. Donkeys laden with cedar
boughs picked their footing on the uneven cobbles; women with gayly
painted cradles on their backs trudged behind the donkeys. Ducks were
swimming in the brimming gutters. Rrok Perolli stood in the doorway of
the Hotel Europa, enjoying the spring air.
Elez Jusuf, chief of the Dibra, with five hundred men, had fought
his way into Tirana, he said. The Albanian government had--well, had
gone to Elbassan. Elez Jusuf was intrenched in the quarter beyond the
mosque, a maze of houses and walled yards entered by only two streets.
For reasons unknown, he had not walked on into Government House.
“Ahmet has gone to Elbassan?” The dismay of my voice surprised me.
No, he was still in Tirana. He was legally, in fact, the government;
by law, when a Minister was out of town his duties fell to one of
the Ministers remaining. Ahmet was the only one left, except the
necessarily idle Minister of Public Works. But what could he do? Elez
Jusuf was in the capital, with five hundred fighting men of the Dibra.
Ahmet had less than two hundred men, raw recruits from the peasant
village of the south. And more information came now from the open door
of reticence. Two days before, Byram Gjuri, an Albanian Gheg chief of
tribes in Montenegro, who had been supplied with arms from D’Annunzio
in Fiume, had marched on Scutari. Scutari had sent him word that it
would fight, and had frantically appealed to Tirana for help. That was
where the regular troops of Tirana had gone. The telephone line to
Scutari was cut. There had been an attack from the Dibra on Elbassan;
the fighting men of Elbassan had beaten it off, but they were staying
in Elbassan through this trouble.
On the face of it, the thing was organized--organized, and supplied
with arms and money from outside Albania. Obviously, the capital
was lost. The government had fled. The telephone lines were cut.
Albania had been broken into its diverse tribes again, disintegrated
into particles held together only by a common spirit which could no
longer express itself coherently. After all the years of fighting and
blockade, all the desperate triumphs of diplomacy in Versailles and
Geneva, here was chaos again, and fresh invaders.
This tragedy was behind the curtain of silence that isolates Albania
from the world. It went on in darkness, unknown. It meant another
war in the Balkans, the kindler of wars in Europe. All along a
thousand miles of new frontier and ancient hatred any outbreak in
the Balkans would spread. Italy would cross the Adriatic again; what
would Jugo-Slavia say to that? Serbia would come down in force from
the north; would Croatia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, not seize
the opportunity to strike at Serbia, the hated new master? Could
Jugo-Slavia turn her back on Hungary, in safety? All the Balkans and
Central Europe are tinder to any spark, to-day. As they were in 1914.
But at that moment I was caring for Albania, for the Albanians who had
sheltered me by their fires and divided with me their corn bread and
goat’s-milk cheese. It was insupportable to me that war was going again
like a flame over those mountain villages, that the last of their men
must fight again on the edge of precipices, and the last of their women
and children die on the trails. There was desperation in the hope, the
irrational faith, which I placed in Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati.
“Ahmet will do something,” I said.
“How can he? The Dibra men are in Tirana, and he has no soldiers.”
“He will do something,” I said, “because he must.”
“‘I think this will be a good year for pears,’ said the bear. ‘Why?’
said the other bear. And the first bear replied, ‘Because I like them.’”
“And who knows,” said I with violence, “that it isn’t a good year for
pears?”
Thus we talked in the cafés, drinking coffee and looking out through
white arches at the plane trees and the donkeys patiently trudging
by. There was nothing else to do. Elez Jusuf was in Tirana, behind
enigmatic walls. Why did he not come out? We did not know. Ahmet was
alone in Government House. The sunshine was warm on white Tirana, the
water rippled in the gutters, the plane trees unfolded their tiny
leaves. The men of Tirana, that lukewarm, Mohammedan, un-Albanian city,
did nothing. They waited to see what would happen. We all waited. The
morning went by.
The morning went very slowly by, and at noon an automobile came
roaring and shaking down the cobbled street. It brought Harry Charles
Augustus Eyres, British minister to Albania. We lunched with him at
the Red Cross house. Lean, dry, humorous eyed, gray haired, wholly the
Englishman, he talked of the psychology of Eastern peoples. He had
been forty years a diplomat in the Near East, and knew his subject.
I was perhaps wrong in connecting his official presence in Albania
with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s negotiations for the Valona oil
fields. He lived in Durazzo, and had that morning received a telephone
message--not from Ahmet--advising him of the situation in Tirana.
“I must go and see my old friend Elez,” he said. It was his only
reference to the immediate situation. “Elez is a fine old chap, you
know. Patriotic Albanian. He had five thousand Dibra men ready to go
into Serbia last year. Bit of a job I had, too, persuading him that it
wasn’t done, really.”
After luncheon he departed, to see his old friend Elez. Later he was
seen riding to Government House. At dinner he said that negotiations
were opened. One inferred that this little matter was practically
settled.
“Queer thing, you know, this tale of Elez Jusuf’s,” he further
remarked. Elez Jusuf, it appeared, said that he was astounded to find
himself in the position of a rebel against the Albanian government.
With the mildest intentions, he had been coming down to Tirana to speak
with that government. Parliament had been elected when the Serbs were
holding all of Dibra; the Dibra representatives had been elected by
refugees, and Parliament had recently unseated them on the ground that
they were not properly elected. This left Dibra without representation
in the council of chiefs, said Elez. Surely it was proper that the
chief of the Dibra should come to Tirana to speak for Dibra to the
government. He traveled with an armed escort, of course, as a chief
should. On the trail he met his friends Zija Dibra and Mustapha Kruja,
with their escorts. They came on together. An hour from Tirana, on the
previous evening, they had met a body of government soldiers, sixty in
number. These soldiers had treacherously fired upon him. His men had
naturally returned the fire. The captain of the soldiers was killed,
the second in command, Sied Bey, fell down a cliff when his horse was
shot beneath him, and Elez Jusuf, very much surprised and perturbed,
came on to Tirana. He said he did not know what else to do. Just before
reaching Tirana, he had met a machine gun or two, and had taken them
along with him, after some incidental fighting. Why was the government
attacking him with machine guns? he demanded. He was not moving against
the government, with five hundred men. When the Dibra moved, it put
five thousand fighting men on the trails.
“A queer tale,” said Mr. Eyres. “I don’t know what to make of it. On my
life, I believe the old fellow’s sincere.”
The Albanians, he said, were a surprising people. Take Ahmet, now. That
afternoon Ahmet had said to him, “You recall the words of Aristides?”
Mr. Eyres, supposing the reference was to some Albanian unknown to him,
had inquired, “Who is Aristides?” And, by Jove! the chap meant the
Greek! Fancy an Albanian knowing about Aristides!
We slept upon these meager developments. Elez Jusuf was still in
Tirana; Ahmet still in Government House. The dynamo ran all night.
Next morning, more news in the cafés. Ahmet was demanding that Elez
Jusuf give up his arms and surrender himself, Mustapha Kruja, and Zija
Dibra for trial. Elez Jusuf replied that it was an insult to suggest
that any Dibra man gave up his rifle while he lived. If Mati thought it
could bring that shame upon the Dibra, the rifles of Dibra would finish
the talking. Mustapha Kruja had disappeared in the night; his men were
left leaderless with Elez behind the barricades. Zija Dibra was still
there. Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra were in the pay of Italy; Elez
Jusuf had been misled, tricked, by them. This was the talk in the cafés.
[Illustration: THE FIGHTING MEN FROM THE MOUNTAINS WHO CAME INTO TIRANA
TO DEFEND THE GOVERNMENT WHILE ELEZ JUSUF WAS IN TIRANA
In this group are men from seven tribes, distinguishable by the pattern
of their trousers.]
Nearly noon, and talk stopping in the cafés. Shops closing, quietly,
one by one. A tightening, an apprehension, in the air. New faces, new
costumes, in the streets. Slowly, slowly, little by little, Tirana was
filling with tall, keen-eyed, weather-bitten men. Men in the tight
white trousers and rawhide opangi of the northern Tirana mountains.
Men in the fuller white trousers and embroidered socks of the central
mountains. Men in the very full brown trousers and curve-toed moccasins
of more southern tribes. Mountain men, all of them. They sat on the low
walls around the mosques, talking. They lounged on the curbstones, they
sauntered on the streets. More and more of them. Impossible to estimate
how many. A thin little trickle going steadily in and out of Government
House. And it was strange how a sense of Government House, a sense
of the one man alone behind those broken walls, grew upon Tirana. It
was as though Government House were a huge, mysterious, living thing.
Men walking in the streets glanced at it furtively, as if it might
be watching them. Groups stood and stared at it. There it was, quite
still. Still, like a crouching animal. What would it do?
Three o’clock, and suddenly the answer. A gust of rifle shots, a growl
of machine guns, and the storm was on us. The streets were swept clean
of people in one quick scurry; windows barred, doors bolted. And we
were running through a swarm of bullets that sang like mosquitoes.
Running, we cried to each other, “Tricked the British Empire, by Jove!”
For the very sound of the guns said that this was grim earnest, this
was the end. Ahmet had gained time enough to bring in the mountain men.
Now he was fighting.
At seven o’clock the next morning he was still fighting. Fifteen
hours, without a break, and Elez Jusuf was still alive and still in
Tirana. When the firing died in the bright morning we went picking
our way through wreckage of mud-brick walls, around bloody cobbles,
past plaster houses ripped to tatters by bullets. In the heart of the
wreckage Elez Jusuf was still holding out.
At ten o’clock a drum beat in the street before the mosque where the
dead men lay, and a crowd listened to the singsong of the government
crier of news. He cried that at twelve o’clock Ahmet Bey would burn the
quarter that sheltered Elez Jusuf. Citizens whose homes were there had
two hours to take out their movable property. Passports to enter and
leave the quarter, obtainable at the post office. Machine guns surround
the quarter. Listen well! At twelve o’clock the machine guns will start
and the quarter will burn. After twelve o’clock no man leaves it alive.
By order of Ahmet Bey Mati.
It is impossible to describe the feeling that day in Tirana. It was as
though a giant hand closed upon the heart, slowly, inexorably. Death.
At twelve o’clock the machine guns will start and the quarter will
burn. No man will leave it alive. Five hundred men. And this was true.
It was not a dream nor a tale in a book. It was reality. We asked,
“Will Ahmet do it?” as one struggles to awaken from nightmare. We were
always answered, quietly, “Yes.” Men were not speaking much, that day;
they simply said, “Yes.”
The procession began. Women bowed under loads of things, blankets,
rugs, chairs, a frying pan, a child’s toy. Children going before them
lugging the spinning-wheel, the hand loom. Smaller children stumbling
and holding on to skirts. Veiled women, sobbing behind the veils,
walking pigeon toed and pitifully on high heels, in hampering trousers,
carrying boxes too heavy, so that they must stop to rest. One little
donkey, going back and forth, back and forth, bringing out trunks and
bedsteads and house doors. And for some time a frantic woman, veiled,
hysterical, clung to us, clung to our skirts on hands and knees,
talking a language we could not understand, pleading, begging as if
for her life, holding up five fingers, measuring five distances from
the ground. Maddening, our inability to understand her. Why the five
fingers? Five what? How could we do what she wanted? A stranger who
spoke French at last translated her words for us. She was a Turkish
woman, her husband was in Constantinople; her five children--little,
little children--were in the quarter. She had been visiting a friend
when Elez Jusuf came in. For two days she had not been able to get
back to the children, and now she saw that other people were bringing
out things, and the soldiers would not let her in to get her children.
We took her to the post office and got her the permit to pass the
soldiers. That was that.
At eleven o’clock we met a teacher in the Vocational School. He said:
“I have come out for a minute, between classes. It---- I wanted to get
away from the boys. We have three grandsons of Elez Jusuf, you know.”
We had not known, and, knowing, what could one say? The teacher seemed
to feel that speaking about it would make it easier to go back to them.
“We couldn’t keep the news out. All these boys know Albanian politics
so well. Damn it! the finest boys God ever made.” There were tears in
his eyes and his words were not profane. “Not one of them missed one
recitation since this thing started. We moved the desks and barricaded
the windows; classes going right on. Boys said to me this morning, they
can’t fight for Albania, but they can study for her. Breaks you all
up, somehow,” he said, apologetically, and blew his nose. “Damn it!”
he said again. “I---- That young boy from the Dibra got up to answer
a question just now, and forgot the question. I said, ‘Never mind.’ I
was going to pass it over. He said: ‘No, please ask it again, sir. I
won’t be much longer in class.’ I thought he was going to break down,
on that, but he answered the question. Answered it right. Goes straight
on, with his head up. Their father’s in that hell hole, too. The boy’ll
have to go back and be chief of the Dibra.”
It was impossible to say anything. We shook his hand and he went back
to the class. Mr. Eyres and his secretary went back and forth, from
Elez to Ahmet, from Ahmet to Elez, hastening, followed by the eyes of
us all. Their faces were not encouraging.
Ten minutes to twelve. The last machine gun chuckling over the cobbles.
Six minutes to twelve. Files of men, with oil cans, going through the
streets. Four minutes to twelve, and the streets emptied save for the
last frantic stragglers coming with last armfuls of things. Three
minutes to twelve--and the drum beating! The open space before the
mosque was a mass of bodies, a suffocation of held breaths. Listen
well, people of Tirana! Elez Jusuf asks for time. A council is talking.
At two o’clock the machine guns will start, and the quarter will burn.
At two o’clock. By order of Ahmet Bey Mati.
It would seem that the pressure of that giant hand would ease, but it
continued to tighten slowly, minute by minute. It continued to tighten,
even when at four minutes to two o’clock the crier called that the
council was still talking. Four o’clock, the third, last order. At six
minutes to four o’clock men were going with lighted torches; the oil
had been spread and wooden sprayers had thrown it over the roofs. At
five minutes to four o’clock the roar of an automobile in the streets,
and Elez Jusuf appeared, riding to Government House in the English car,
Mr. Eyres beside him. Tirana followed them to the gate in a wave of
men, a wave that slowed, eddied before the gate, and stopped. It seemed
that time stopped with it.
Out of the gate a rider, lashing a galloping horse. Clatter of
spark-scattering hoofs on the cobbles, swish of the whip, and a swirl
of wind following. Four o’clock, and the ripping sound of one machine
gun, stopped abruptly. No more.
Ten minutes after four o’clock, and Elez Jusuf and Mr. Eyres riding
out of the gate. Elez Jusuf sat straight and proudly; a fine old
mountaineer in his Scanderbeg jacket and silver chains, overlooking the
crowd as though it were not there. Only a glimpse of black Scanderbeg
jacket, silver chains, gray hair, profile of firm lines, and Elez Jusuf
had made entrance and exit.
Immediately after the automobile, while the gate of Government House
still fascinated, two riders came through it. They were Austrian
engineers, in khaki riding clothes and puttees. They rode pack mules,
and camping outfit complete with tent was roped to the wooden saddles.
We knew them slightly, and stopped them as they came leisurely by, to
ask what they knew.
Nothing, they said. Ahmet had sent for them that morning--they were
engineers employed by the government--and had asked them to make ready
to go out toward Dibra, to investigate and report on the possibility of
lighting Tirana with electricity from a waterfall twenty miles away.
They had been ready at one o’clock, and Ahmet had sent asking them to
wait, ready, in the courtyard of Government House until he gave them
the word to start. Word had that moment come, and they were starting.
They stirred the smallest of interest as they rode on through Tirana.
Tirana was relaxing, as a tired man sighs. Men sat on the curbs, on
the low walls, on the ground. There was a crowd in the cafés, but no
singing, and little talking. The sunset hour was beginning, but no one
walked.
In the whitewashed dining room of the Vocational School we sat drinking
tea. Mr. Eyres disclaimed the tiredness of his eyes. It had been most
interesting, he said. An interview he would not forget, that between
old Elez and Ahmet. “A strong man, Ahmet. Perhaps a little young,
just twenty-six, they tell me. Well, time will remedy that.” Elez
had been persuaded to go to Government House to meet and talk with
Ahmet. “Really a remarkable man, old Elez. He’d never before seen an
automobile, you know. Walked right up to it, sat in it, as though he
had ridden in one all his life; never turned a hair, coming or going.
Must have been a bit of a strain, after all he’d gone through.” He said
to Ahmet that he had talked with his men. They would not give up their
rifles. If it were required that they give up their rifles, Elez would
go back to his men and they would die fighting. Ahmet said, “Mustapha
Kruja will be hanged when we find him. Zija Dibra must leave Albania
forever. Give me a _besa_ of peace and go back to the Dibra with your
rifles.”
Elez was silent a moment, and then gave the _besa_. The Dibra, he said,
would be loyal to the Constitutional Government of Albania as long as
he lived, and as long as his son’s sons ruled the Dibra. He saluted,
Ahmet saluted; the official interview was ended. And the messenger
left to countermand the orders given. “Something rather dramatic about
these chaps, really. Done just like that. No palavering, no signing of
papers. Not necessary, and Ahmet knows it. Elez would be cut into bits
before he’d break a _besa_. They’re admirable, in their way, these men.”
Elez, turning to go, had turned back to speak again to Ahmet. The
Dibra and the Mati had long been enemies, he said. There had been no
friendship between them since the days of Scanderbeg. Was this not
a time to forget that old enmity? In their mountains, Dibra had not
understood the Tirana government. During those three days in Tirana,
Elez said, he had learned many new things. He believed now that Ahmet
Mati was fighting for Albania. Would Ahmet join him in a _besa_ of
peace between Mati and Dibra?
This had been entirely unexpected, Mr. Eyres said. However, Ahmet
did not turn a hair. He and Elez made the _besa_ of peace, and then
Elez added another thing. “I have heard,” he said to Ahmet, “that you
intend to disarm the men of Dibra. You have not expected to do that
without fighting. Now I, Elez Jusuf, chief of the Dibra, say this: The
Serbs hold our city of Dibra. The Serbs are on the lands of my people.
Twice in this year the Serbs have come to kill our men and burn our
villages. Only our rifles stand between us and the Serbs. But you are
the chief of Albania and you are a wise chief. When you think it is
time to come to the Dibra to take away the rifles of the Dibra, I will
give you every rifle. There will be no trouble. I say this, on the
honor of Dibra.”
Even this, to Mr. Eyres’s deeper astonishment, did not cause Ahmet
to turn that hair. He said merely, “That is well.” The interview was
ended. On the way back to his men, Elez suggested to Mr. Eyres that he
leave his son as hostage to insure that he had spoken the truth. If he
broke the _besa_, he said, in a matter-of-fact manner, Mr. Eyres might
kill his son. Misunderstanding Mr. Eyres’s reaction to this offer, he
added that his son would be glad to make his life a forfeit for the
honor of Dibra. “But what on earth would I do with the chap?” said Mr.
Eyres to us. “Bless my soul, I know old Elez will keep his word! Well,
rather! I told the old man to jolly well take his son along with him.
By the way, the young Elez has two lads of his own here in this school.
Asked me to give them greeting from him, said he was sorry he couldn’t
stop to see them. Elez’s riding out on the Dibra trail by this time, I
expect.”
The young secretary of the absent Prime Minister came at that moment
to confirm this conjecture. The crisis was over. Albania, we said, was
saved once more. If the uprising had been--who could say?--an Italian
plot, Italy was checkmated again. There would be no new outbreak in
the Balkans this time, and that precarious balance in all European
politics, the Balkan equilibrium, was unchanged. We were saying this,
and I was thinking of the two Austrian engineers riding behind the
retreating Dibra men on their quest for electric lights for Tirana,
when the second blow fell upon us.
The Red Cross mail car, gone that morning to meet the Italian steamer
at Durazzo, returned with the news that Hamid Bey Toptani, brother of
Essad Pasha, had taken Durazzo. He was an hour from Tirana, coming on
the Durazzo road, with at least six hundred armed men. How many more
were hidden in the hills when the automobile passed, no one could
guess. Under the American flag, the car had gone and come through the
lines, and no secret had been made of the fact that Tirana would be
attacked that night.
There is a point at which human nerves cease to report emotion. For
three days and nights we had felt all that we are capable of feeling.
We heard this news blankly, understanding it, thinking about it, and
hardly caring. There was no resilience left in us with which to care.
It was like beginning again a story we had once read.
“Where did Hamid Bey Toptani get his arms?” I asked. For the Toptani
family are not mountaineers, nor chiefs of mountaineers. The peasants
on the great estates of the plains do not carry rifles.
“There is an Italian gunboat in the harbor of Durazzo, and another at
San Giovanni,” said the American who had gone with the mail.
“It does look like a well-organized plan,” we said. Scutari attacked,
Elbassan attacked, Durazzo taken, Tirana attacked from the west and
from the east. A plot, in which only one small thing had gone wrong.
Had old Elez Jusuf, tricked by his two friends into involving the
Dibra, come too early to Tirana? Had Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra
intended to bring the Dibra men from the east when Hamid Bey Toptani
came from the west? Was it because the plan miscarried that they had
urged Elez Jusuf to sit intrenched in Tirana, while they hoped that
Toptani would come in time to help them take Government House? Or had
the Dibra men come on time, and Toptani purposely delayed, to leave the
hard fighting in Tirana to the Dibra men?
Futile questions, for we could not know the answers. And our thoughts
settled upon Ahmet, three days and nights without sleep or rest, the
one man who was the government, sitting alone in Government House with
the checkerboard of this situation before him. How well he had moved
the pieces! Bringing in the British minister, to give him time to bring
in his fighting men. Settled, in his mind, that to-day must remove Elez
Jusuf, though he burned half Tirana to do it. And sending out, ten
minutes behind Elez, those two engineers to plan electric lights for
the capital! To plan electric lights for the city that--surely he knew
it--Hamid Bey Toptani would attack that night. Ahmet, the Hawk, chief
of the Mati, come from the court of Abdul Hamid when sixteen years old,
to fight the Serbs in the mountains. The chiefs of the Mati must lace
his opangi before every battle, because he did not know how to lace
opangi. But the chiefs of the Mati loved him.
Two horses went cantering past the windows of the Red Cross dining
room, and because the clatter of horse’s hoofs is rare in Tirana they
must be bringing news. From the gateway of the courtyard we watched
them--a rider in the Mati costume, leading a lean, eager bay horse.
They went through the gate to Government House. In a moment they
reappeared, Ahmet Bey Mati riding the bay. He still wore the clothes
in which I had seen him; rumpled a little, they spoke of the sleepless
nights, and his face was white with fatigue. On his head an astrakan
fez; over his shoulder the strap that held a rifle; around his waist
the cartridge belt, and a belt holding silver-hilted revolver and
knives. A strange figure, in tailored business suit, riding the lean
bay through the streets of Tirana. Behind him, coming with the long
swinging walk of the mountaineers, perhaps sixty Mati men.
“Long may you live, _zonya_!” said he, touching the astrakan fez in
salute.
“Long may you live, Ahmet Mati!”
They rode past the pictured mosque, down the street of little shops
and cafés, closed now, past the cemetery with its toppling turbaned
gravestones. At the barracks they stopped. For a moment Ahmet spoke
with the chiefs who gathered around his horse. Then he rode on, out on
the road to Durazzo, and behind him went his hundreds upon hundreds of
fighting men. It was the sunset hour; the mountains and the sky were
beautiful, and the little owl was beginning to call from the Cypress of
the Dead. The prayers of the _hodjis_ rose to Allah from the tops of
the white minarets.
The moon was late that night, and mountains and plains were covered
with darkness when the rifles began to crackle on the hills. Little
flames of rifle fire ran along the tops of the hills like flickering
lightning. It was as though the hills were crackling with electricity.
We stood in the courtyard of our house, watching them. Government House
was dark; the engine was no longer running. The little owl called from
the Cypress of the Dead. Sied Bey came through the gate and said to us
in French that he feared there would be trouble again in Tirana that
night; might the women and children of his family stay in the Red Cross
house? There was his old mother, who was ill; his sister, and many
children of his brothers and his cousins, little children. They had
come in that day from his estate, where the fighting was. Did we think
the Red Cross would give them shelter till morning, under the American
flag?
They came behind him, through the darkness, and we said we would
take them to the Vocational School. Sied Bey could not leave his
post at Government House. There were the two veiled women, and nine
women servants carrying rolls of bedding, and so many little girls in
voluminous trousers, with chains of gold coins on foreheads and necks,
and so many very small boys in Turkish trousers and Scanderbeg jackets,
that we never counted them. We got them all into the Red Cross dining
room, where there was space for them to sleep on the floor, and we
offered them cigarettes and coffee. Within the dining room the sound of
the rifle fire was no louder than the soft crackling of burning wood.
The older woman, worn and wrinkled and pale with illness, sat on the
cushions arranged for her by a servant, accepted the cigarette which
another servant had put in a long jeweled holder, and smoked silently.
But the younger one, throwing back her veil with a violent movement,
startled us by the revelation of a strong, beautiful face and eyes
full of anger. She spurned the cushions, she walked up and down like a
furious animal in a cage.
“Pardon me,” she said, suddenly, in perfect English. “Forgive me.
You are good to shelter my mother. But I--but I am not made to stay
here, to stay here in a house, when there is fighting. Do you hear the
rifles?” She struck her clenched hand against the edge of the table,
and blood came on the knuckles. She walked up and down.
“Do you think I cannot fight?” she said. “Ask my brother. Ask the
Serbs if I can fight. There is not a man in Albania who knows a rifle
better than I. They did not keep me in a house when the Serbs came! I
was out on the hills with the men when the Serbs came. And now--now
when traitors, when men who sell their honor for money, are murdering
Albania, I must sit in a house! I must sit on a cushion!” She stamped
on the cushion. “I, who have killed nineteen Serbs with these hands!
I must stay with my mother, because she is ill. Let Sied stay with my
mother. I have a rifle; I want to fight! Do you hear the rifles?”
We were appalled. We were speechless before that infuriated woman who
had killed nineteen Serbs with her hands. We went away, leaving her
walking up and down, while her mother silently smoked and the children
watched from their heaps of rugs.
In the street by the gate of Government House Sied Bey was watching the
sky to the northwest. Five red flares were there now, and the rifle
fire was running like flickering lightning over the western hills.
“It is too bad my sister is not there,” he said. He was proud of her.
“My sister was a lion when the Serbs came in. There is no man better
than my sister in a battle.”
He had not taken his gaze from the red flares. “Five villages,” he said
as though to himself. “This morning I was _seigneur_ of those five
villages, and to-night they are burning. _Eh bien_,” he said. “They
were rebels, then, my peasants. They were sheltering Hamid Bey. Their
villages must be burned.”
The rifle fire went away over the hills. It wrote on the darkness as it
went that Hamid Bey Toptani was retreating. Then the moon rose over the
eastern mountains, and Tirana was white in the moonlight, and there was
no sound except the flowing of water in the gutters and the calling of
the little owl in the cypress.
In the morning, all Tirana gathered silently about the strangest sight
ever known in that youngest city of Albania, which remembers only
three hundred years. Workmen were in the cemeteries. Groups of ragged
workmen walked upon the graves, loading the turbaned gravestones on
wheelbarrows, wheeling them away and dumping them beside the Durazzo
road. There were wooden plows, drawn by oxen, going over the Mohammedan
graves, plowing down the weeds. Ahmet Bey had given orders, before he
left Tirana, that all the old sacred cemeteries be made into public
parks. The sensation was profound. All day long a mass of fezzes
surrounded each cemetery. Their wearers said nothing, said not one
word; they stood and watched, silently. The workmen worked silently.
The only sound was the grating of levers on tombstones, the crunching
sound of the plow on the graves.
There was no news from Durazzo.
In the afternoon, another surprise for the citizens of Tirana. Three
hundred men were working on the Durazzo road. They began where the
road turns, beyond the barracks. With plows they went up and down the
road, many times. Ahmet had said that the road must be plowed deeply.
Ahmet had said that the road must be made slightly rounded, broad, with
ditches on either side. Men were digging the ditches. And two by two,
along the road, men were sitting facing each other, a hard rock between
their knees and hammers in their hands. Rhythmically striking, they
were breaking into little fragments the old turbaned gravestones from
the cemeteries. Heaps of the broken rock grew around them. Farther down
the Durazzo road more rocks were being piled ready for them to break.
Donkeys were carrying these rocks from the river bed east of Tirana.
At sunset Tirana went out to walk, and there was that sight. No longer
a road to walk upon, but havoc of plowed ground and broken stones.
Ahmet Bey Mati had said that there must be a stone road from Tirana to
Durazzo, forty miles. The road was following him on the way he had gone
to fight Hamid Bey Toptani. There was still no news from that fight.
The people said, “Ahmet Bey Mati,” in a strange tone. Partly amazed,
partly awed, partly colorless shock. They said, “Ahmet Bey Mati,” but
the placards that men were tacking to the Cypress of the Dead were
signed simply, Ahmet Zogu. He no longer called himself a bey; he no
longer used even the Turkish title given his family when Scanderbeg
was dead and the family became Mohammedan, the title which changed the
old name, Zogu, to Zogolli. The placards said that Tirana was under
military law; all shops and cafés would be closed, and no one walk on
the streets, after nine o’clock. Signed, Ahmet Zogu.
At nine o’clock not a light showed on the streets and no footsteps were
heard on the cobbles. Ahmet Bey Mati had become an awful invisible
figure, a sort of limitless and incomprehensible power, in the darkness
over Tirana. There was still no news from Durazzo.
Next morning the telegraph wire from Durazzo began again to click the
instrument in the room above the post office. Orders were coming from
Ahmet Bey Mati. Among them, orders that we should have guides, horses,
and interpreters for our trip to the mountains; a message to us that
the chiefs of Mati and Merdite, and the prefect of Scutari, had been
advised of our coming and would give us all facilities. On the wire the
operators talked, and travel was again open on the Durazzo road. News
poured upon us.
Hamid Bey’s forces had been routed and scattered; Hamid Bey’s family
had escaped on an Italian gunboat; Hamid Bey had been pursued, turned
back on the very shore where a boat waited for him, was being hunted
northward through the mountains. Three men had been hanged at Shijak,
and the _han_ there, which had been Hamid Bey’s headquarters, was
burned. Durazzo had made no resistance to Ahmet. Ahmet had fined
Durazzo five thousand napoleons--twenty thousand dollars--to punish it
for not resisting Hamid Bey. Tirana was fined five thousand napoleons
for not helping the government when the Dibra men came in. Ahmet
Bey had arrested twenty-nine men, who would be tried in court for
treason. Five villages on Sied Bey’s estate were ashes, the families
homeless. Hamid Bey’s property was confiscated; his country house would
be burned. Byram Gjuri had fled to Belgrade. Scutari had not been
attacked. Zija Dibra would be taken to-morrow to Durazzo, to be put on
a steamer for Constantinople. All Albania was quiet.
That day I met on the street His Excellency Spiro Koleka, Minister of
Public Works, who had called upon us in the night when the government
was fleeing from Tirana. “_Vous voyez, madame_,” said he, triumphantly,
“_Je vous ai dit la vérité. Tout est tranquil._”
There is no more to this tale. This was the end of the March rebellion
of 1922, which for a week was one of the lighted fuses to the powder
magazine of Europe. It was lighted--I can only guess by whom--and was
stamped out by a chief of the Mati mountaineers, in Albania. A little
country, which no one knows. Albania--somewhere in the Balkans, isn’t
it? Or is it in the Caucasus? One of those places that are always
having revolutions, people fighting among themselves. Ought to have
sense enough to settle down and go to work.
There is no more to this tale. Our trip to the mountains is not part of
it. Only a few more pictures come into my mind, when I remember those
days in Tirana.
Picture of Ahmet Zogu, riding back from Durazzo. Riding the tired bay
horse, at the head of his Mati men. Riding through a silent crowd
which silently parted to let him pass. Rifle and revolver, knives and
cartridge belt, gone. The gray business suit cleaned and pressed. A
white face, and darkness under the eyes, and eyes that see straight to
the end of things. Soft tramping of feet in rawhide opangi behind him,
and the Mati men in dingy black-braided trousers and colored sashes and
Scanderbeg jackets, rifles all-angled above their kerchiefed heads,
pouring down the narrow street. Then lumbering behind them, dust filmed
and mud splashed, the empty automobile of the Albanian government,
gone forty miles to Durazzo to fetch Ahmet and come back empty because
he would ride at the head of his men. It goes last through the gates
of Government House, and the crowd can gaze only at the gate and its
solitary guard.
Picture of Ahmet in his house. He sits in a gilded Louis Seize chair,
under a painted Turkish ceiling. Half a hundred rifles, museum pieces
he has chosen from the long mule trains of rifles brought down to
Tirana as the mountain tribes are disarmed, are stacked behind his
chair. A box telephone on the wall, an English grammar on the table,
a Mati man lying on the threshold of the door. Ahmet saying: “Albania
needs men, needs trained men. What am I, with power in my hands that I
cannot use because I am ignorant? I do not know Europe, America. Tirana
needs factories, Albania needs industries. The people are starving
and ragged; they walk with bare feet over the earth that covers their
fortunes. We need capitalistic development, not a hundred years from
now, but to-day. I am no good for that. How can we handle this? You
are from America. Can you tell us? Oil, mines, forests, water power,
land--what can Albania do with them, without trained men?”
Another picture, a little one. Ahmet smiling. “Ah, but you wouldn’t
have been surprised if you had known, as I did, the men who were the
rebels. They were rich men. I thought, ‘Not all will be killed in the
fighting; we will capture some, arrest others. Why try them and hang
them? Their money will be more useful than their bodies. We will try
them and fine them.’ I thought how much money they had, and decided
there was enough money there to pay for electric lights for Tirana, so
naturally I sent for engineers to go out as soon as the Dibra trail was
clear.”
“You had no doubt that you’d clear the trail?”
“I had no time to doubt. I was busy clearing it.”
And a last picture, always to be remembered by those who know Tirana.
It is the sunset hour, and all Tirana goes walking in the colored
evening air. Tirana goes walking down the smooth Durazzo road, the
road that is white and firm beneath the feet, from the turn beyond
the barracks all the way to the sea. The Cabinet Ministers of Albania
go walking in a row, sedately, their hands behind their backs, and in
the middle walks Ahmet Zogu, elected by Parliament Prime Minister of
Albania. Six even paces behind them marches their escort, a single row
of soldiers.
The eastern mountains are catching the last light of the sun and making
magic with it. Plum purple, orange gold, mauve and violet and blue, the
colors shift and change, and the air is faintly golden over the green
plains where the mountain men are gathering as they used to gather in
the evenings long before Athens was built. Holding hands in long lines,
moving in a stamping circle, they are singing songs improvised by their
leader, who, with a handkerchief in his hand, acts in pantomime the
verses he creates. The strange, wild song in which they have clothed
and preserved the tales of all their heroes of two thousand years is
heard far over the green plains, where flocks of sheep are coming home
with little tinkling of bells.
“Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey! [they sing].
Ahmet, the Son of the Mountain Eagle!
His wings spread out and cover us,
The shadow of his wings is over us,
His claws are terrible to our foes.
Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!
The men of Dibra came with their rifles,
Elez Jusuf, the chief of the Dibra,
Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra,
The Toptani family, curse of Albania,
Hamid Toptani, with nine hundred soldiers,
Nine hundred soldiers armed by Italians,
Came from Durazzo to murder Albania.
Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!
“Elez Jusuf goes back to the Dibra,
_Besa_ of peace he has given to Ahmet.
Hamid Toptani flees through the mountains,
Cursed be the trees that give him hiding.
Zija Dibra is sent to Stamboul,
Zija Dibra, exiled from Dibra.
Five thousand napoleons, fine of Durazzo,
Five thousand napoleons, fine of Tirana.
Five villages burned. Let the market place tell
Names of the men who were hanged there at dawn.
“Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!
He set three hundred men to work on the roads,
He built a good road from Tirana to Durazzo,
He makes electric lights in the capital of Albania.
O! O! Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! Ahmet Bey!”
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
In a few cases, obvious errors or omissions in punctuation have been
corrected.
Page 43: “kept out bodies warm” changed to “kept our bodies warm”
Page 119: “a freize of living bodies” changed to “a frieze of living
bodies”
Page 340: “blood ame on the knuckles” changed to “blood came on the
knuckles”
The spelling of Spiro Koleka’s last name has been corrected.