RUSSIAN INTERVENTION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF 1877
With the return of spring I resumed my position, and when I arrived at
Cettinje, in the beginning of April, the situation was one which made
it politic for the Sultan, had he known his pressing interests, to
yield to the conditions on which peace could have been preserved.
Montenegro held a position stronger than that of the year before, and
the Prince, under diplomatic pressure, withdrew the conditions which
he had originally insisted on, except two, viz., the recognition of
the independence of the Kutchi and the repatriation of the refugees
from Herzegovina, with guarantees for their tranquillity. This latter
was a _sine qua non_ of the restoration of Montenegro to its original
condition, for the principality was supporting on the slender basis of
its always insufficient means a population almost equal to its own,
and was already in a state approaching famine. Russia was sending
shiploads of corn, and English charity was, as it always is, large,
but the retention of the refugees permanently was impossible, even
with foreign aid. They were destitute not merely of homes but of
earthly goods, to an extent that made them as helpless as children,
for there was no more work to be done in the principality than the
women were accustomed to do in war time.
Russia declared war on the 25th of April, and the English agent left
four days later, warmly saluted by the Prince, who had found in him a
true and disinterested friend. Jonine's animosity towards Monson was
intense, and as the former, as Russian plenipotentiary, considered
himself entitled to give direction to the diplomacy of Cettinje, he
was furious over the evident favor with which Monson was regarded by
the Prince, who often followed his advice. It was a sore point with
the Montenegrins, from the Prince down, that Jonine was so officious
in his intervention even in military advice, where he had not the
least competence; and in general the Montenegrins resented the
dictation of the Russian staff, even where it had every reason to urge
its own views of the operations. On the occasion of the next birthday
of the Czar, which was as usual celebrated in Montenegro by a
diplomatic and official dinner, the Prince refused to come to the
table, sending Duby to preside. Jonine was extremely unpopular with
Prince and people, owing to his dictatorial ways. The Austrian
representative had an opening to great influence which he might have
seized if he had been a man of tact, but he was ostentatiously hostile
to the Prince and the Montenegrin cause. Monson, on the other hand,
and Greene, the English consul at Scutari, exerted their influence in
every way for the principality, and but for them the supplies of grain
from Russia, which had been sent on during the armistice and had been
maliciously delayed by the authorities at Scutari as they came by
water through the Boyana, would probably have been stopped at the
critical moment by the outbreak of hostilities.
The news of the declaration of war by Russia produced immense
enthusiasm in the principality, and the people now felt that they were
in a position to fight out with the Turks the quarrel of four hundred
years. With the Prince and his staff, I went to the new headquarters
at Orealuk, where he had a little villa nearly midway between the pass
to the plain of Niksich and Podgoritza. The southern frontier was held
by the division of "Bozo" (Bozidar) Petrovich on the west of the Zeta,
and on the east by that of the minister of war, Plamenaz, posted on
the heights over Spuz. They were opposed by Ali Saib Pasha and two or
three subordinate generals. On the north, at Krstaz, was Vucotich, the
father-in-law of the Prince, a brave man, but neither a good general
nor a good administrator, and to his incompetence as strategist the
Montenegrins were indebted for the egregious failure of the northern
defense. This failure at one moment menaced the total collapse of
the Montenegrin campaign, from which the ability of Bozo saved it.
Suleiman Pasha, later distinguished by his Bulgarian campaign,
had replaced Mukhtar, and had spent three months in drilling and
disciplining his troops for the Montenegrin method of fighting. The
terrible passes of the Duga offered ideal positions for a defense by
such a force as the Montenegrin,--brave, good shots, and absolutely
obedient to orders; and the best military advice on our side
pronounced them impregnable if properly defended.
So the Prince went to Ostrog, and the northern army took position
on the plain of Niksich, the advance posts being connected with
headquarters at Ostrog by telegraph, and I took up my quarters with
the Prince in the convent. With great ability, Suleiman out-manoeuvred
Vucotich in the Duga, and debouched in the plain near Niksich before
the Montenegrin army could reach Plamnitza, where the valley of the
Zeta and our position at Ostrog were to be defended, and if Suleiman
had pushed on without stopping to recruit he might have taken us
all in our quarters. The mendacious dispatches of victory from the
Montenegrin commander gave us to believe that the Turks were kept at
bay, until we found that they were actually in Niksich, and there was
not a single battalion to serve as bodyguard to the Prince at Ostrog.
Simultaneously with the attack on Duga, the army of Ali Saib attacked
on the south; but, defeated most disastrously two days in succession,
was obliged to relinquish the effort to meet Suleiman in Danilograd,
where, if united, they would have held the principality by the throat.
The reports of the fight from Bozo sent me down to get the details of
the victory, of which he had given me by telegraph a summary account,
and I arrived at his headquarters at Plana, overlooking the Turkish
movements, late that afternoon, accepting an invitation to pass the
night and see the operations of the next day. Until I arrived at his
camp Bozo had received no information of the passage of the Duga, nor
of the relief of Niksich; but I had not been with him two hours before
we saw the smoke arising from the villages on the northern slopes of
the heights that commanded the head of the valley of the Zeta, which
connects the plains of Niksich and Podgoritza and divides Montenegro
into two provinces, anciently two principalities,--the Berdas and the
Czernagora or Black Mountain. This conflagration showed that Suleiman
had crowned the heights, and would have no more difficulty in
descending through the valley to Danilograd. Suleiman's campaign was
planned on the idea of a triple attack on the heart of Montenegro,
by himself from Krstaz, Ali Saib from Spuz, and Mehemet Ali, my old
friend in Crete, from Kolashin via the upper Moratsha, the three
armies to meet at Danilograd. Ali Saib and Mehemet Ali were
disastrously defeated, though before I left Plana in the morning a
third attack from Spuz was begun, and fought out under my eyes while I
waited, the Turks being driven back again.
I started for a leisurely ride back to Ostrog, and half way there met
a fugitive who told me that the Turks were at the convent, and the
Prince retreating on the western side of the valley. Another half
hour and I should have been in the hands of the irregulars, who were
skirmishing and burning, killing and plundering, as they followed the
eastern side, the two armies being hotly engaged in the forests along
the crest of the mountains above us around Ostrog. I retrograded to
Plana, and thence, by the urgent counsels of Bozo, to Cettinje, as the
position was critical, and the campaign might take an unexpected turn
and make my escape impossible.
The army of Suleiman took ten days of fighting to cover the distance I
had made in three hours' leisurely ride, and reached the plain of Spuz
so exhausted and decimated that Suleiman had to reorganize it before
he could make another move. He had narrowly escaped a great disaster,
possibly the surrender of his whole army, only by the incompetence of
the Montenegrin commander. He had abandoned all his communications
with Niksich, like Sherman at Atlanta in the American war, and had to
depend on what he carried with him, for the country offered nothing.
Vucotich, instead of intrenching himself with his main force in the
woods in front of Suleiman, adopted the tactics of opening to let him
pass, and then attacking him in the rear, though he was strong enough
to have stopped him and starved him into surrender. As it was he lost
10,000 men in the passage of the Bjelopawlitze. At this moment the
English consul at Scutari, Mr. Greene, came to Cettinje and visited
the camp of Suleiman, in which visit I wished to imitate him, but he
warned me that it would be probably a fatal call, as I would not have
been allowed to return. Mr. Greene gave me Suleiman's account of the
fighting in the Duga, in which the Turkish general described the
Montenegrin attacks as displaying a courage he had never before
witnessed. They charged the solid Turkish squares, and, grappling the
soldiers, attempted to drag them from the ranks. The Montenegrin loss
was 800 killed. The ammunition was bad, and the mountaineers often
threw their rifles away and attacked with the cold steel. The average
advance of the Turks was about a mile a day.
So we waited for the next news from Suleiman with an anxiety in
Cettinje not known for a generation. It was supposed that Suleiman
would repeat the campaign of Omar Pasha, moving on Cettinje by Rieka,
and all the fighting men were called out and the villages on that side
evacuated. In this state of painful expectation the news arrived of
the passage of the Danube by the Russian army, and the recall of
Suleiman and his army for the defense of the principalities. The
relief in Cettinje rose to jubilation, and we all returned to our
habitual life.
The Prince, freed from this incubus, prepared for the siege of Niksich
in good earnest, and, with the diplomatic representatives and the
Russian staff, we returned and pitched our camp in the plain, by
the side of a cold spring (Studenitzi), which supplied us with an
abundance of water, but within cannon shot of the fortress, the shells
from which were going over us continually, striking in the plain a
few hundred yards beyond us and bursting harmlessly. If the Turks had
understood howitzer practice they could have dropped their shells
amongst us without fail. The horses could not graze, and the women who
came with their husbands' rations could not reach us without passing
within gunshot of the outlying trenches of the Turks, and I have seen
a file of them come in, each with a huge loaf of bread on her head,
and the bullets from the trenches flying around them, but not one
hastening her step or paying the least attention to the danger. This
is the habit of the Montenegrin woman, who would consider herself
disgraced by a display of fear, no matter what the danger. I have seen
them go down to the trenches where their husbands were lying for days
together, during which time the wives brought the rations every five
days, and they always took the opportunity to discuss the affairs
of the household deliberately, though under fire, and walk away as
unconcernedly.
But our quarters at Studenitzi were not to the taste of the attachés
who took no part in the fighting, and we broke camp, and moved off to
the edge of the plain, all the time under the fire of the artillery of
the fortress. The Montenegrin artillery was brought up, and one by one
the little forts which studded the margin of the broad expanse were
taken. The first attacked held out till the shells penetrated its thin
walls, and then surrendered unconditionally. The garrison, twenty or
more Albanian nizams, were brought to the headquarters, and we all
turned out to see them. Bagged, half famished, and frightened they
were, and, through an Albanian friend who interpreted for me, I
offered them coffee. They looked at me with a surprise in their eyes
like that of a wild deer taken in a trap, and resigned to its fate,
knowing that escape was impossible; and when they had drunk the coffee
they asked if we were going to decapitate them now. When I assured
them that there was no more question of their decapitation than of
mine, and that they were perfectly safe, they broke into a discordant
jubilation like that of a children's school let loose; life had
nothing more to give them. They had no desire to be sent back to their
battalions, and they stayed with us, drawing the pay and rations they
should have had, and rarely got, when under their own flag.
The scene our camp presented was one to be found probably under
no other sky than that which spread over us in the highlands of
Montenegro. The tents of the Prince, the chiefs, and the attachés
were pitched in a circle, in the centre of which at night was a huge
camp-fire, round which we sat and listened to stories or discussions,
or to the Servian epics sung by the Prince's bard, to the
accompaniment of the _guzla_, to which the assembly listened in a
silence made impressive by the tears of the hardened old warriors,
most of whom knew the pathetic record by heart, and never ceased to
warm with patriotic pride at the legends of the heroic defense, the
rout of Kossovo, and the fall of the great empire, of which they were
the only representatives who had never yielded to the rule of the
Turk. Substitute for the rocky ridge which formed the background of
the scene the Dardanelles, and the fleet drawn up on the shore before
Troy, and you have a parallel such as no other country in our time
could give. Both armies retired to their tents at nightfall, and no
sentries or outposts were placed on either side at night; and now and
then a long-range skirmish went on, or a Montenegrin brave, tired
of the monotony of such a war, would go out between the lines and
challenge any Mussulman to come out and try his prowess with a
Christian. One pope, Milo, a hero of the earlier war, rode up and down
before the Turkish outposts, repeating every day his challenge, and at
last the Turks hid a squad of sharpshooters where he used to ride, and
brought him down with a treacherous volley, then cut off his head and
sent it in to the Prince.
Our guns were not heavy enough to cope with those of the fortress, and
so we passed the time shelling the redoubts thrown up on the little
hillocks around the town, alternating these operations with an
occasional assault of one of the nearest of them when the men got
impatient for some active movement. Meanwhile we learned that the
Russian government was sending us four heavier guns, sixteen and
thirty-two bronze rifled breech-loaders, the heaviest we had being
ten-pound muzzle-loaders against a battery of field guns, Krupp steel,
breech-loading twelve-pounders. The Russian guns were landed on the
Dalmatian coast below Budua and carried across the narrow strip of
Austrian territory which separated Montenegro from the sea, between
two lines of Austrian troops, lest some indiscreet traveler should
reveal the violation of neutrality, and were brought to Niksich, about
forty miles, on the shoulders of a detachment of Montenegrins over a
roadless mountain country, no other conveyance being possible.