THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE
To me Russie's death was a crushing disaster. The care and constant
preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to
activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my
condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental
void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not
Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where
the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short
my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an
introduction to the manager of the "Times," and offered to pay my
expenses should the "Times" not accept my letters. I knew so well the
condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan
affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced
that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought
matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement
this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the
disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would
come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after
went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with
the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me
for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless
they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the "Times" now served me
as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same
time I arranged to send letters to the New York "Herald," also as a
volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.
Arriving at Trieste in August, 1875, I found that a committee was at
work sending arms and ammunition, and, following the coast down, I
found other committees at work at Zara and elsewhere, under Austrian
auspices, without any attention being paid to their action by the
Imperial authorities. At Ragusa I found the headquarters of the
agitation, there under the direction of the captain of the port,
Kovachevich, a zealous Slavonic patriot. The movement was evidently
regarded benevolently by the Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, and the insurgents
came openly into the city, and returned again to their fighting with
fresh supplies of ammunition and provisions. I pushed on to the Bocche
di Cattaro, and at Castel Nuovo found the insurgents coming and going
freely, and at Sutorina, in the corner of Herzegovina, which comes to
the Gulf of Cattaro, their depot and manufactory of cartridges.
The information to be obtained there was abundant, if not always
absolutely trustworthy; but on the whole I found the only fault of
that which I got from the insurgents was its exaggeration, while
what I got from the Turkish consul-general at Ragusa was simple
fabrication. Volunteers fully armed went by every steamer, and when
they had enough of campaigning they went to Castel Nuovo and
refreshed themselves, and returned, quite regardless of the Austrian
regulations. I found that the insurrection was spreading through
all the mountain section of Herzegovina and along the border of
Montenegro, and it was said that strong detachments of Montenegrins
were aiding in the operations. The Prince of Montenegro had opposed
the insurrection in the early stages of it, and had even sent old Peko
Pavlovich to arrest the Herzegovinian leader, Ljubibratich, and carry
him to Ragusa, where he left him under Austrian authority, to return
freely as soon as his band had reunited. But as, according to the
general Slav opinion, there was nothing important to be done without
Montenegro, I pushed on to Cettinje to see with my own eyes what there
was to see.
The little world about Cettinje has changed so much since this my
first visit there, and was so little known then by the outer world,
that my experiences there will be to the present day like those which
one might have in a perished social organization. The only access to
the capital of the principality was by a zigzag bridle-path up from
Cattaro to a height of 4500 feet above the sea,--a hard, rough road,
more easily traveled on foot than in the saddle, and so I traveled it,
in the company of a Scotch cavalry officer intending to volunteer.
Passing the rocky ridge along which ran the boundary between freedom
and Austria, one descended by another precipitous path into the valley
of Njegush, the birthplace of the family of the Prince, a circular
amphitheatre of rocks, a narrow ridge here and there holding still a
little earth on which the people raised a few stalks of maize or a few
potatoes, a few square yards of wheat, or a strip of poor grass for
the sheep or goats. Every tiny field was terraced against the wash
of the rains so that the soil should not be carried away, for the
geological formation of this part of the principality, Montenegro
proper, is a porous rock, which allows water to filter through it, and
which is even so fissured that no stream will form, and the drainage
is through the rocks or in _katavothra_ which gush out in mysterious
fountains in the Gulf of Cattaro or into the Lake of Scutari.
Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of
a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor,
with two or three--of which one was the house of the Petrovich
family--of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the
women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children
peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing
through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an
enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we
were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the
"Times" apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found
and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses
were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had _accidentally_
come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent
down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious
was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without
orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within
the gates.
The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good
carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over
which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one
to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there
is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of
Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus
in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin
system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make
roads for Austrian artillery.
Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three
exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the principal was the
"palace," a residence which in another country would have been a poor
gentleman's country house. Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and
announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second
largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the
little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of
nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a "Times"
correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday
occurrence. No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as
impassive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there,
no one seemed at all curious about our business. This was the manner
of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in
everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb
of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information.
We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing
billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we
laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any
news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer
any questions other than evasively. And it was only after a long
acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was
able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin. The generations
of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to
mislead,--four hundred years of a national existence of combat and
ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia,--had
developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and
singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring
outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman. I was,
however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I
reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where
he heard appeals of all kinds, from petitions for help to the last
recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which
every Montenegrin was entitled, and without which none submitted to an
unfavorable judgment.
The moment was critical, for communications had been passing between
Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against
the Sultan, for which the entire population of the principality was
impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that
Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the
alliance. The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men
complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and
would be nerveless. The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to
gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain
the people from going in limited numbers, and in an unobtrusive way,
into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly
within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem,
the Turkish government had never terminated the _de jure_ state of
war with the principality, or acknowledged its independence, and
the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an
intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the
city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably,
as Troy was for ten years. As to operations in Herzegovina, small
bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a
movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the
frontier when they had had a brush, but all _sub rosa_.
The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a
good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time
when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been
deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of
the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved
condition of all the population around. He is a man of large mould, of
a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preëminence amongst
his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to
large men, and a hearty _bonhomie_ which with that simple people was
a bond to the most passionate devotion. He is quick-witted and
diplomatic, with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the
elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his
subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head
of a family amongst them. He could give you off-hand the genealogy of
each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken
refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from
the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their
early history. When the young men played at games of strength or
skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so
well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so
that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the
heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was
nervous and excitable. In all but military abilities he had grown
curiously to the measure of his place, and his diplomatic abilities
more than compensated for the want of the military. And what was most
singular was that his early education in Paris had not spoiled the
Montenegrin in him.
Probably much of this conserved character was due to the Princess, an
admirable woman, who deserves a place amongst the world's remarkable
female sovereigns; for her energy, patriotism, and instinct of the
obligations of the crisis were more remarkable than anything else
connected with the house of Njegush. Beautiful even at the period in
which I first saw her, gifted with a tact and sympathetic manner quite
regal in their reach, she held her husband up to action and decision
when his own nerves were shaken. A Montenegrin of voivode stock, the
daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been
the right-hand man of Mirko, the father of the Prince, the
commander-in-chief of the previous reign, she had the true Amazonian
temper, and would not have hesitated to take the field had the courage
of her husband failed him; though, in tranquil times, she was a true
Slavonic woman, domestic, affectionate in her family, and effacing
herself before her husband. I remember that the Prince told me that,
after the splendid victory of Vucidol, he sent two couriers to
announce to the Princess at Cettinje the news of the victory, and the
first question she asked of them was, "Did the Prince show courage?"
and when they replied, with a little Montenegrin craft, that they had
had to hold him by force to keep him from plunging into the mêlée, she
gave them each a half ducat. "And," said the Prince, "if they had said
that I had led the charge, she would have given them a whole ducat."
But, with all his civic virtues, the Prince was the very type of a
despotic ruler. The word "constitution" was his bugbear, and he would
not abate one particular of his absolute power, or tolerate the
slightest deflection of his authority in his family, any more than in
the principality. His will was the law, and though, in the details of
administration, the voivodes and the "ministers" were trusted, nothing
could be decided without his personal supervision, nor was any
decision of a tribunal settled without an appeal to him in person.
One day, as I sat with him under the Tree of Judgment, we saw in the
distance a number of the common people approaching the tree. "Now,"
said he, "you will see a curious thing. This is a case of appeal from
the decision of the head men of a village on which there had been
quartered more of the Herzegovinian refugees in proportion to their
population than they thought they should support, so that they sought
relief by sending a part of the refugees to a neighboring village
which had not had what they considered its due charge. The villagers
of the second village appeal from this overcharge, alleging that their
means do not permit them to receive more than they actually have." The
rival deputations approached the tree, cap in hand, and, on the Prince
giving the order to open the case, it was stated through the head men
as the Prince had summarized it. The Prince heard both cases and then
asked the head man of the lesser village if they had done as much as
they could do in the way of relief, and the head man explained that
their village was small and poor (which was quite unnecessary to say
of a Montenegrin village), and they could not support more refugees;
whereupon the Prince, addressing himself to the deputation of the
larger village, repeated to them the parable of the widow and her
mite, and, assuring them that the little village had done its best,
as the widow did, and they must be content, dismissed the case, and
without a word of complaint the two deputations went off together,
discussing with each other in the most friendly manner; and the
discontent, so far as we could see, was at an end.
But if this patriarchal form of government was interesting, the
character of the people under it was still more so, and it was to me a
great pleasure and privilege to be enabled to study, as I did for the
three years of the insurrection and war, a nation in the earliest
stage of true civilization, corresponding as nearly as we can
reconstruct ethnology to that of the Greeks in the time of the Trojan
war, arms but not men being changed. The honesty and civic discipline
were perfect, hospitality limited only by the ability to give it, and
the courage and military discipline absolutely unquestioning. If the
Prince ordered a position to be stormed, no man would return from the
attack till the bugle sounded the recall. I remember charges made
during the war in which the half of the battalion was down, dead
or wounded, before they could strike a blow, and this without the
presence of the Prince to stimulate the soldier; but, before him, no
man would flinch from certain death when an order was given.
The honesty was singular. I remember that one day, when I was in
Cettinje, two Austrian officers came up from Cattaro, and one of them
lost on the road a gold medal he wore, which was picked up by a poor
woman passing with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro
and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had
lost the medal. Sexual immorality was so rare that a single case in
Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this
virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of
the great war was disastrous. The Russians introduced beggary and
prostitution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during the
two later years made theft common; but stealing was considered such a
disgrace by the Montenegrins that during all my residence there I had
only one experience,--the theft of a small pocket revolver by my first
Dalmatian horse-keeper, and I think that robbery with violence was
never heard of in the principality. During the third year I carried,
for distribution among the families of the killed and wounded, the
large subsidies of the Russian committees, amounting to several
hundred pounds in gold, and in this service I penetrated to the
remotest parts of the principality until I reached the Turkish posts
in Old Servia, countries of the wildest character, with a very sparse
population; and, though it was known that I carried those sums, I was
never molested, though I had only one man for escort. And during the
two campaigns which I made with the Prince, living in a tent, on the
pole of which hung my dispatch-bag containing my store of small money
(it being impossible to obtain change for a piece of gold anywhere in
the interior), and no guard being kept on the tents, I never lost a
_zwanziger_, or any other article than a girth by which the blanket
was fastened on my horse when grazing at night; and, as the blanket
came back, even that did not look like a theft.
And yet so poor and so contented were they that the life of the
primitive man could not have been much simpler. I have seen, in the
cold end of September, in the high mountain districts, a whole
family of little children, whose united rags would not have made a
comfortable garment for one of them, playing with glee in the fields.
On one occasion, when I had been caught by the heavy autumn rains in
remote Moratcha, roads washed away and riding a mile impossible, I had
to take with me two or three men, beside my guide and horse boy, to
make a road where I had to travel, and we were obliged to halt for the
night at one of the poorest villages I ever saw in Montenegro. The
best house in it was offered me, with such fare as they had, to
supplement bread which I had brought from the convent. The house had
but one room, with a large bedstead built in it of small trees in the
rough, and the beaten ground for floor. The bed was given up to me,
and the family lay on the ground with a layer of straw, which was
all that the bedstead had in the way of bedding. When we left in
the morning I was asked for no compensation, nor did it seem to be
expected; but, as my silver had been expended, I gave the woman of the
house (the husband being at the war) a gold ten-franc piece. She took
it shamefacedly, turned it over and over, looked at it curiously, and
then asked my guide, "What is this?" It was the first time in her life
that she had seen a gold coin, and the guide had to explain to her
that it could be changed into many of the zwanzigers or beshliks which
were the only coins she knew. And with all this poverty they seemed
most happy when they could extend their poor hospitality to a
stranger, and always reluctant to receive any compensation, though the
Prince was obliged to furnish to the general population about half the
breadstuffs they used in the year.
Seven senators were always on duty near the Prince; they received
about $250 a year each when on duty, at other times nothing. The
entire civil list of the Prince amounted to about $250,000 a year,
from which all the expenses of the government, civil, military, and
diplomatic, had to be paid. But for the subsidies of Russia and
Austria-Hungary the entire people must have migrated long ago, and I
have several times heard Montenegrins say, when asked why they did not
build more substantial houses, that "they were not going to stay
there long, but meant to get a better country." And yet, like most
mountaineers, they were so attached to this rugged and infertile
country of theirs that there was no punishment so hard as exile.
During the greater part of the time I spent in the principality the
entire male adult population was on the frontier, or fighting just
beyond it, and, when a messenger was wanted, the official took a man
out of the prison and sent him off, with no apprehensions of his not
returning. One such messenger I remember to have been sent to Cattaro,
in Austrian territory, with a sum of three thousand florins to be paid
to the banker there, and he came back before night and reported at the
prison. Jonine told me that one day, being in Cattaro, he was accosted
by a Montenegrin, who begged for his intercession with the Prince to
let him out of prison. "But," said the Russian official, "you are no
more in prison than I am; what do you mean?" "Oh," said the man, "I
have only come down for a load of skins for Voivode So-and-so, but I
must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje." The prison
was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of
several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all
the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal
terms; and if, as sometimes happened, the guard was called away,
any of the prisoners was ready to take his rifle and duties for the
moment.
I have seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off
the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being
that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do.
He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work
on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy
work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was
almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the
Albanian raids, the agricultural and much other work fell necessarily
to the women. When there were considerable flittings from Cettinje,
and the amount of baggage to be carried down to Cattaro was large, it
was always allotted to one of the most intelligent men to judge of the
weight; and when it was a heavy package he said, "This is the load of
a man," or, if a light load, "This is for a woman," many of whom were
waiting, eager for the chance of gaining something by their labor. But
no compensation will induce a Montenegrin to accept a work which is
considered not the work of a man.
In military courage and docility the Montenegrin probably stands at
the head of European races. He is born brave, and comes under the law
of military obedience as soon as he can carry arms. The good wish for
the boy baby in his cradle is, "May you not die in your bed," and to
face death is to the boy or man the most joyous of games. I have seen
a man, in the midst of a hot interchange of rifle bullets between the
Turkish trenches and our own, the trenches occupying the crests of two
parallel ranges of low hills, go around outside the works and climb
with the greatest deliberation up the hillside, exposed to the Turkish
fire, and back over the breastwork into our trenches, all the time
under a hail of rifle bullets. During the siege operations at Niksich
the Prince was obliged to issue an order of the day forbidding burial
to any man killed in this ostentatious exposure to the Turkish fire,
so many men having been killed while standing on the crests of the
shelter trenches in pure bravado. While lying at headquarters at
Orealuk (where the Prince had a little villa), waiting the opening of
the campaign of 1877, I was walking on the terrace with him one day
after dinner when I noticed a boy of sixteen or eighteen standing at
the end of the terrace with his cap in his hand, the usual form of
asking for an audience. "Now I'll show you an interesting thing," said
the Prince, as he made a sign to the boy to approach. "This boy is the
last of a good family, whose father and brothers were all killed in
the last battle, and I ordered him to go home and stay with his mother
and sisters, that the family might not become extinct." As the boy
drew near and stopped before us, his head down and his cap in his
hands, the Prince said to him, "What do you want?" "I want to go back
to my battalion," the boy replied. "But," replied the Prince, "you are
the last of the family, and I cannot allow a good family to be lost;
you must go home and take care of your mother." The boy began to cry
bitterly. The Prince then asked him if he would go home quietly and
stay there, or take a flogging and be allowed to fight. He shook his
head and stood silent a little while and then broke out, "Well! it
isn't for stealing; I'll take the flogging!" that being the deepest
disgrace which can befall a Montenegrin. And he broke down utterly
when the Prince finally said that he must go home, for his family was
a distinguished one, and he was not willing that no man should be left
of it to keep the name. "But," said the boy, "I want to avenge my
father and brothers," this being the highest obligation of every
Montenegrin. The boy went away still crying, but when he had gone the
Prince said, "I know that he will be in the next battle in spite of
anything I can say."