THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA
I have anticipated the events of the year, but this illustration of
the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put
their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will
help to give significance to the story. Without being undiplomatically
frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his rôle on the
other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended on
Montenegrin action, and that he, to a certain extent, must permit
his people to follow their sympathies. The young men went in groups
without any pretense of organization, with their rifles and yataghans,
and, when the opportunity offered, took part in any pending skirmish,
and then came home, to be replaced by others. To have forbidden this
would have made the people mutinous, and the Dalmatians, though under
the authority of Austria, were no more closely held to neutrality than
the Montenegrins. The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more
patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted
to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to
reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way,
allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and assume
the direction of the insurrection.
There was nothing more to be learned in Montenegro that belonged to
war correspondence, and I went back to Cattaro. There I learned that
there was a great assemblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner
of the principality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and
enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I
went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic
tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to
their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom
they defeated disastrously in 1869. The Crivoscians contributed an
important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to
be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo
we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from
the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was
seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in
the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.
Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and
children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such
remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few
old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the
storm should be over,--wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of
their hasty flight from "the abomination of desolation," for it seemed
as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything
out of his house, and woe had been pronounced upon them that were with
child and them that gave suck in those days. I had seen enough of the
horrors of suppression of Christian discontent by the Mussulmans of
Crete, but the brutality of the Slavonic Islam in time of peace was
other and bitterer than the Cretan, and the miserable remnant of
escaped rayahs of Herzegovina was the very ragged fringe of humanity.
I wish every statesman who had ever favored tonics for the "sick man"
could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the
damning accusation against the "unspeakable Turk" in these escapes of
the peaceful stragglers from massacre and rapine which every rising
in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our
civilization. There were whole families in such rags that they would
not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city,
lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even
more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation.
We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the
fringe,--a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the
misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only
less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the Montenegrins
housing a double charge.
I was desirous to learn from themselves the details of their
oppression, and my friend questioned one group as to what they had to
complain of. It was practically everything but death,--their cattle
taken, their crops ravaged or reaped by the agas, the honor of wives
and daughters the sport of any Mussulman ruffian who passed their way.
One tall, gaunt old woman, who had not spoken, but listened, with a
face like a stone, to all that the others replied, suddenly threw her
ragged robe over her head and burst into a tempest of tears. Another
turned to me a stolid face, saying, "Gospodin! we do not know what a
virgin is!" I saw enough of it before I had finished to have made the
world turn Turcophobe. And twenty years later we hear of the same
fruits of the same régime and, as I found then, Christian statesmen
who tolerate it.
I tried to penetrate to the scene of the fighting in Herzegovina, but
was on all sides warned that from Grahovo it was impossible; it was
necessary to return to Ragusa. There I learned that a fight had just
taken place on the road between Trebinje and Ragusa. There is a
good carriage road between the two cities, and, in company with two
colleagues, and under the guidance of a daring carriage driver, we
went to Trebinje. The plain between the frontier and Trebinje is a
waste of limestone crags and blocks, scattered as if after a combat of
Titans, a miserable stunted vegetation springing between the rocks,
capable of hiding thousands of men within a rifle-shot from the road,
and, as we found, actually hiding a good many. But word had been sent
before by our friends the patriots, and we only caught a glimpse of
one insurgent, and saw one dead Turk, a victim of the last skirmish,
whose body the garrison had not dared come out to bury.
We brought the first news the pasha had received in five days. He gave
me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which
old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured
it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues
had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the
pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men. I had seen many
Turkish pashas, but never one of that type,--amiable, lethargic,
and quite indisposed to do any harm to anybody, and he could not
understand why the insurgents could not let him alone; he did not want
to disturb them. He complained bitterly that ill-disposed people had
been stirring up the population of his province and that, though he
had a force of two thousand men, the disorderly Herzegovinians made it
very difficult for his men to go about. It was really pathetic to hear
him. He wished harm to no one; so courteous and civilized-over was he
that one could easily imagine that such officials at Constantinople
might give the Turcophile color to a _corps diplomatique_. Invited
to coffee by the Austrian consul, I heard the views of a man whose
experiences have been equaled by few, for he had been fourteen years
at that post; and he fully confirmed the impressions I had from the
refugees at Grahovo. But, on the other side of the matter, I was
really interested in the Turkish troops, so good-natured, so patient,
and not in the least concerned at having been several months besieged
and blockaded, supplies short, and relief not even hoped for. I hated
the system, but I could not help liking its victims on both sides.
Returning to Ragusa, I found Ljubibratich on the point of returning to
the insurgents' camp at Grebci, just over the Austrian frontier, and
only about three hours' walk, we were told, from Ragusa. They came
with unrestricted freedom from camp into Ragusa, carried away what
supplies of any kind they needed, and, when ill, came to the hospital
of the city. Dalmatia and its medley of races are still in the Eastern
state of activity, in which time is of no account; and, instead of
getting off in the early morning to return before night, as arranged,
we left Ragusa at 2 P.M. We were in October, and the shortening days
did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those
in Montenegro. On the way across the frontier the going was simply
climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the camp only at dusk.
Grebci was an abandoned village of the Herzegovinian population,
robbed and maltreated even here within a rifle-shot of the Austrian
territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the
frontier. There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900
men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry,
wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles
with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border
warfare. There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent
of Duzi; Luka Petcovich, a Herzegovinian of the Montenegrin frontier,
a tried Turk fighter; and the fighting popes of three villages of
Orthodox Christians, Bogdan Simonich, Minje, and Milo. There was a
small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux,--one of the
bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,--ten Russians, and a
few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender,
while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty
ship's biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a
timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and
hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two
days before. The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit
had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for
this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable. We heard the
story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in
a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and
escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions
of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a
possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away
the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish
soldiers killed. In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy
stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of
transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the
mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition
out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of
victory permitted by the circumstances.
The Italians sang songs, and the whole band made merry till far into
the night, when the correspondents, the honored guests, to be served
with the best of the accommodations, were shown to the abandoned house
of the captain of the village, a stone-built hut, the only one of two
stories, which gave us a board floor to sleep on in the upper story,
garnished with a bundle of straw for each of us, on which we lay down
to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering,
and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be
awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was
like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to
shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the
first daylight came we turned out and made our way back to Ragusa.
Dissensions and mutual recriminations followed the defeat of Utovu,
Peko openly expressing his disgust with the insurgents of the plain,
who were braver when there was no enemy than when the fighting was
imminent, and he marched off to a position in the hilly country nearer
the Montenegrin frontier, leaving Ljubibratich with the men of the
low country. The lull brought into action that Shefket Pasha who,
the following year, inaugurated the "Bulgarian atrocities," and who,
declining to attack the band of Peko, came to vent his prowess on the
people of the Popovo plain, of whom about five thousand had returned
from exile in Dalmatia under the guarantee of the Turkish authorities
of freedom from molestation on resuming their ordinary vocations.
These were all Catholics, and the Catholics of Herzegovina and Bosnia
have always been submissive, even to all the rigors of the Turkish
rule, while the Orthodox Christians have been the rebels, the popes
being generally the captains in time of war. Shefket, disregarding
the guarantees of his government, marched on the villages of Popovo,
killed or carried away prisoners all the men who did not escape again
over the frontier, and allowed the bashi-bazouks to plunder and
ravage. Male children were killed with the men; and the women,
abandoning everything they could not carry, returned to Austrian
territory, where I visited them to get the facts of the matter.
The result was that I decided to go to Mostar and lay the facts before
the consuls, who had been charged to form a commission to investigate
and report on the state of things in Herzegovina. I was joined by the
correspondent of "Le Temps" and a Belgian engineer engaged on the new
road beyond Seraievo, and we engaged a courageous coachman to drive us
to the capital of Herzegovina, for timid people would not venture
to make the journey, such was the anarchy of the country. As far as
Metcovich we were in Austrian territory, but there we fell into the
Asiatic order of things, meeting a frontier guard of ragged Turkish
regulars, to whom the visas on our passports seemed of small account,
in view of their evident desire to regard us as enemies; and all along
the road to Mostar we had the scowling faces of the native Mussulmans
bent on us as we passed, and the few Christians we saw wore an air of
harelike timidity.
The city of Mostar is one of the most picturesque I have ever seen. At
that time its dirt, decay, and generally unkempt appearance added to
the picturesqueness, but not to the comfort. We got shelter at a khan,
whose owner hardly knew if he dared admit a Christian guest; but the
authority of the English consul, Mr. Holmes, reassured him, and we
were admitted to the society of more fleas than I had considered
possible at that time of the year. I had, however, provided myself
with an ample supply of the Dalmatian product known as "flea powder,"
the triturated leaves of the red camomile which grows in great
perfection all over the mountains of Dalmatia and Montenegro, as if
nature had foreseen that it would be especially needed there, and I
slept in comparative immunity, though my prior experiences in hostelry
had never given me an adequate understanding of the khan filth and
discomfort.
I found that the consuls had all been fully informed of the general
state of the country and the treachery exercised by the Turkish
commanders, and Holmes told me that he had reported to the ambassador
at Constantinople what he had learned, and that his report had been
sent back with orders to make it less unfavorable to the Turks. Holmes
(later Sir William Holmes, the distinction being well deserved for
the courage and honesty with which, though strongly Turcophile in his
tendencies, he exposed the abuses) said to me, relating this fact,
"What can I do? I tell him what I know to be the facts as I have
learned them, and he wants me to change them to make the report more
favorable to the Turks!" I put his case before the public in the
"Times," and the honest fellow reaped the reward he deserved, though
against the will of his ambassador.
Here I met again an old Cretan friend, Server Pasha, sent to try the
same silly, futile tactics which so failed in Crete, i.e. offering the
insurgents elaborate paper reforms in exchange for actual submission.
He reminded me of the reply of the local commandant of the army at
Mostar when one of the consuls remonstrated at the authorities having
taken no action in a case of peculiarly brutal assassination in the
city of Mostar, the author of which had not even been arrested. The
Colonel Bey replied, astonished, to the indignant consul, "Why,
haven't we made a report?" The case was rather a peculiar one: a young
Mussulman, having received a present of a new rifle, went out into the
suburbs, and, seeing a Christian boy gathering the grapes from his
mother's vineyard, took a pot shot at him and shot him through the
body. The young assassin was carried in triumph about the town on the
shoulders of his playmates, and was never in any way punished for the
crime. I had the story from the surgeon who attended the Christian
boy, and from Mr. Holmes. I took a keen delight in illuminating the
intelligent mind of Server Pasha as to the true condition of the
country, telling him what I had seen and reported to the "Times;" and,
as he knew me well, and that I was trustworthy in my reports,--for he
knew how A'ali Pasha had regarded me,--he was in a curious state of
mental distress. On his report to Constantinople, the consul-general
at Ragusa, an Italian Levantine called Danish Effendi, whom I had also
known at Syra in the old days, was ordered to make an investigation
into the Popovo atrocities, and, being under the eyes of a large body
of correspondents and a Christian public, he reported confirming my
report.
Our return to Ragusa was not entirely free from excitement, for the
indigenous Mussulman had less avidity for prey he saw going into the
trap, Mostar, than for that which he saw escaping, and we had to face
small predatory detachments of bashi-bazouks raiding in the country we
passed through, who looked at us with eyes of fire, and muttered in no
doubtful language, interpreted by my colleague of "Le Temps," who knew
Turkish, what they would be glad to do with us. As we sat eating our
lunch in the shelter of a hovel by the roadside, while the horses were
baiting, a party of the fanatics watched us with growing malignity
and a truculent interchange of sentiments of an evidently unfriendly
nature. To puzzle them as to our status, I took the pains to repeat in
conversation with my colleague the formula of adherence to the faith
as it is in Islam, a scrap of Arabic I had learned in Crete, the
repetition of which, according to the rite, is equivalent to the
recognition of Mahomet and his teachings. The effect on them was
curious, and, though they evidently did not consent to regard us as of
the true faith, they as evidently were puzzled, and we went our way
unmolested; but I felt more at my ease, I am willing to admit, when we
passed the last Turkish post on the road.