THE TAKING OF NIKSICH
To the Prince the siege of Niksich was like a game of chess played by
cable, a move a day. But even this brought progress, and, when we had
taken the outlying blockhouses, one by one, and there remained only
the citadel, a flimsy fortress, mainly, I should judge, the work of
the Servian kings, all that remained to accomplish was the bombardment
of its walls, which became a sort of spectacle, to which we went day
after day to watch the effect of the fire, as we should have done with
a game of skittles. I climbed up on the top of a neighboring mountain,
and, with my field-glass, inspected the town. Women went and came with
their water-pitchers on their heads, moving in serene tranquillity,
without quickening a step, and the life of the place seemed absolutely
undisturbed by the danger, as if shells did not burst. Now and then
one of the houses caught fire and varied the show; the Turkish return
fire was mainly directed at the batteries where the great Russian guns
were posted, and the Montenegrins used to sit on the rocks around,
utterly heedless of the Turkish fire, despising cover. Finally a shell
fell and exploded in the midst of a group of men, and, for the time,
cover was made compulsory by order of the Prince. But the rank and
file grew impatient, and demanded an attack with such insistence that
the Prince was obliged to move. There were two steep ridges to the
west of the city, crowned by strong stone breastworks and held by
considerable detachments of regulars, being positions of supreme
importance, as they commanded the redoubts on that side from a
distance of 300 to 500 yards. The Prince gave the assault of one to
a battalion of Montenegrins, and the other to the Herzegovinian
auxiliaries.
There was in our camp a young German officer who had been under a
shadow, and had been sent away to retrieve his reputation for courage.
He came to Montenegro to earn a decoration, and begged the Prince to
let him go with the Montenegrin battalion. At the foot of each ridge
was an outwork which had first to be taken by assault, from across the
open, and which was taken in the early twilight, the Turks seeking
refuge in the redoubt above. The Montenegrin force reversed the works
they had taken, and a desultory rifle fire went on till it was too
dark to see the sights of the rifles. We, the spectators, were
assigned posts to see the spectacle as at the theatre, and went to
them just after sundown. The straggling fire of the early twilight
stopped, and there was an unbroken silence and immobility which lasted
perhaps twenty minutes, and until everything had become vague and
indefinable in the deepening twilight, when we heard the signal, given
by a trumpet call, and instantly the steep sides of the two ridges
were crawling with gray shadows, and a terrific fire burst out from
the redoubts at the top, lasting for hardly ten minutes, when it
as suddenly ceased; and then, after a brief pause, the Montenegrin
trumpet sounded from the summit of their ridge to tell that the work
was done. We trooped back to our tents and to supper, and presently
came in our little German friend, unharmed and exultant. His account
was graphic. The Montenegrins had taken the outwork, working up on
hand and knee, crawling and firing from such cover as they could find
until the Turks broke and escaped to the summit, and the Montenegrins
lay close behind the wall they had taken. When the trumpet sounded
they threw their rifles down, drew their sword bayonets, and made a
rush with the naked steel. The fire broke out from the redoubt above,
said our little German, with a roar that was absolutely appalling; it
was as if the sky were woven with whistling missiles, and but for very
shame, seeing the rage of combat in the men around him, he would have
lain down in overmastering panic. But no man halted, and the race
between the two battalions was won by the Montenegrins only by a
minute, and they poured over the wall of the redoubts, the Turks who
could escape going out at the rear as their assailants poured in. When
it comes to this final charge, the Montenegrin always leaves his gun
behind and trusts only to the cold steel.
The next morning a flag of truce came to ask for terms, and the town
surrendered on condition of the garrison going out with their arms and
their private property. We went out to see them defile past the Prince
and his staff. The poor fellows were in rags, and the bundles they
carried on their backs contained everything they had in the world.
Wives and children in numbers followed or preceded, and to our
attempts to show them little kindnesses they shrank from us as if we
had been wolves, the children generally howling with fear when we
offered them a biscuit or a coin. One of our battalions escorted them
through the narrows of the Duga, and, when they reached the wild and
bosky gorge which makes its strongest position, the women stopped in a
paralysis of panic, asking if this was the place where they were to be
butchered, so completely had the Turkish authorities impressed on them
the fiction of infallible slaughter for all who fell into the hands of
the Montenegrins. The Prince gave the inhabitants four days to choose
whether they would stay and become his subjects or take all their
possessions and go to Albania. The most had decided to stay, when word
was sent them from Spuz that all who accepted the protection of the
Prince would be expelled and have all their property confiscated when
the Turks returned, and many were frightened into revocation of their
submission. Some were as irreconcilable as wolves, and would not
endure conversation with us. I found a little fellow, about five or
six, pasturing a lamb in the outskirts of the town, and tried, with
the aid of the interpreter, to enter into conversation with him, but
to no effect. He repelled every advance, and, when I offered him a
piastre, he refused it with a savage dignity, saying that he had money
of his own and did not want mine.
We took an immense booty in provisions, artillery (nineteen guns),
tents, and war material, left by Suleiman in the expectation of
returning after he had made the conquest of Montenegro. Ammunition
there was none, for the artillery had been supplied with old
muzzle-loading pistol and other cartridges broken up for the last
weeks of the siege. And so ended the contest of four hundred years.
The easy terms accorded by the Prince to the garrison of Niksich
brought their compensation a little later, when, the liberated
garrison being besieged anew in the impregnable fortress of Spizza
dominating the road from Dalmatia to Antivari, they gave in without a
serious defense, satisfied with the honors of war. It was clear,
from the testimony I was able to collect from Turkish deserters and
prisoners, that the obstinate defense of the garrisons under siege
was oftener due to the desperation inspired by the assurance of the
Turkish authorities themselves, that no quarter would be given to
those who surrendered, than to the bellicose ardor. A captain of the
Turkish nizams, who had commanded one of the little fortresses beyond
Niksich, and who surrendered to Socica when he knew that his tower was
undermined and would be blown up in a minute if he did not surrender,
declined to be released, as he knew that, whatever might happen to his
men, he would be shot for surrendering, and no account taken of the
necessity of saving the life of his men, to say nothing of his own.
The method of Socica in attacking those towers, which were of stone,
without any artillery, was to construct a wooden tower on wheels,
strong enough to resist rifle balls, and which, moved by the men
inside, approached the fortress, till actually in contact, when a mine
was put under the wall and the garrison was summoned to surrender.
Our Albanian captain preferred the climate of Cettinje to that of
Podgoritza, and there I made his acquaintance. He had not received a
penny of his pay for forty months, and was in rags and shoeless in
the depth of winter, when I knew him. I bought him some shoes and
second-hand clothes, and interested the Prince in his case, so that
finally he was given a place on the staff and regular pay. The
gratitude of the poor fellow was embarrassing. He begged me to take
him as a body servant, declaring himself ready to go with me to the
world's end, and I could hardly make him understand that a servant
would be a burden to me which I could not afford. He said to one of
the Montenegrin officers, "When I say my prayers for myself I always
ask God to be good to that English gentleman." As with most of the men
of his race whom I have made the acquaintance of, his native faculties
were of a high order. The Albanians are quick, ingenious, and
industrious, and are the best workmen in the finer industrial arts of
the Balkans, gold and silver workers of remarkable skill, dividing
the blacksmithing with the gypsy, but the best and indeed the only
armorers of that world. We had a number of them in the camp at
Niksich, refugees from the tribes on our frontier, and I found them
most interesting companions, generally speaking Italian and Serb as
well as their own dialects. Their conservatism is something almost
inexplicable. A friend who had campaigned with them told me that when
they sacked a village their first quest was always for old iron, which
they valued more than gold and silver, an estimation which can only
be the heredity of an age when iron was the article of the highest
utility, for now it is easy of acquisition everywhere about their
country. They reckon their ancestry from the mother, and when my
Cretan cavass, Hadji Houssein, spoke of his home, it was always as his
"mother's house."
Niksich settled under Montenegrin rule, and order established, the
Prince moved his headquarters to Bilek, a fortress which commanded the
roads from Ragusa to the interior of Herzegovina, and whence he could
dominate all the southern sections of that province, protecting his
frontier. There was, as usual, no road for wheels, only a rough
bridle-path, and the mobility of the Montenegrins under those
conditions was remarkable. They carried the thirty-two-pound
breech-loaders on fir poles run through the guns and supported on the
men's shoulders, faster than our horses could walk, and the artillery
rapidly distanced the staff and _corps diplomatique_, not even a rear
guard remaining with us. In company with one of the aides I rode on
under the impression that headquarters were behind us, until we got
lost in the labyrinth of paths running about the forest, and we lay
down under a tree to rest and wait for the staff to overtake us. Here
one of the perianiks found us and brought us to the Prince, who had
gone ahead on a blind road, with half a dozen perianiks, two or three
sirdars, and the diplomats. He had tried to show his knowledge of the
country and lost his way; so, coming to a pretty dell which took his
fancy, he ordered a halt and preparations to pass the night, and there
we found him.
We had no tents; the rendezvous for the night had been at Tupani,
several miles from where we were, and the division commanders were
with the men and had no communication with us. We had eaten an early
breakfast, and had brought no food; the only blankets were those of
the Prince. The perianiks gathered wood and made a fire, round which
we gathered, for the night set in sharp, it being the middle of
September in a high mountain country. One of the men had taken the
precaution to put two or three pieces of bread in his haversack before
starting, and this was divided between us, and I made my supper on
this and some wild plums I found growing there. Later the men went out
to forage and found a farmhouse, where they got straw and milk, with a
little sheep's-milk cheese. The proprietress, aroused by the invasion,
came down on us in a veritable visitation, furious at our burning her
wood. She abused the Prince and all the company in the most insulting
terms, and was finally placated only by a liberal compensation for
her wood. I spread my bundle of straw under the wild plum tree, and,
covered by my ulster, tempted sleep. I dozed until the ants found me
out, when, unable to lie quiet under the formication, I got up and
passed hours walking up and down till I was so tired that I almost
fell asleep walking; then I lay down again and slept for an hour, but
the cold and the ants awoke me again, and I spent the rest of the
night by the camp-fire. Meanwhile the army collected at Tupani knew
nothing of the Prince, and, with the early dawn, patrols were sent off
in every direction to beat up the country in search of him. Had the
Turks been on the lookout they might have gobbled up the Prince and
his diplomats without difficulty. Beaching the general rendezvous, I
decided that a more active occupation than following the tactics of
the Prince would suit me better, and I turned my horse's head towards
Niksich again. Another tedious siege like that of Niksich was not
to my taste, and I decided to explore the remoter provinces, and if
possible go to Wassoivich, the only corner of the great Dushanic
empire into which the Turk had never penetrated even for a raid,
where, under the rugged peaks of the Kutchi Kom, survived the best
representatives of ancient custom and life.