the Turkish victories over a Serbian army composed principally of peasants put suddenly into the ranks, with a salting of real soldiers; but very little, in comparison, of their failures and defeats in the conflict with Montenegro. Goptchevitch has supplied[1] a detailed account of the operations. I shall refer only to the most remarkable. On the 28th of July the men of Tsernagora encountered Muktar Pasha, and for once with superior force. Four thousand Turks were killed, but only seventy men of Montenegro. Osman Pasha was taken; Selim was among the slain. At Medun, on the 14th of August, twenty thousand Turks were defeated by five thousand of these heroic warriors; and forty-seven hundred slain. On the 6th of September five battalions of Montenegro defeated Dervisch Pasha in his movement upon Piperi, and slew three thousand of his men. On the 7th of October Muktar Pasha, with eighteen thousand men, drove three Montenegrin battalions back upon Mirotinsko Dolove. Here they were raised, by a junction with Vukotitch, to a strength of six thousand men. Thus reinforced, they swept down upon Muktar, and, after an action of sixteen hours, drove him back to Kloluk, leaving fifteen hundred dead behind him. On the 10th of October Dervisch Pasha effected an advance from the south, until he found himself attacked simultaneously at various points, and had to retreat with a loss of two thousand men. On the 20th of October Medun was taken, and the Ottoman general fled to Scutari, leaving garrisons in Spuz and Podgoritza. The armistice arrested this course of disasters, when the southern army (Dervisch) had been reduced from forty-five thousand to twenty-two thousand, and the northern (Muktar) from thirty-five thousand to eighteen thousand.
So much for that "indomitable pluck" of the Turks which has since moved the enthusiastic admiration of a British minister.
Goptchevitch reckons the slain on the Turkish side at twenty-six thousand; on the side of Montenegro, at one thousand. And there is no wonder if we find the Montenegrins now aspire to breechloaders and to cavalry: they captured from their enemies (with much besides) twelve thousand breechloaders and fifteen hundred horses.
Montenegro brought into action, in all, twenty-five thousand men; seventeen thousand of her own, two thousand allies, and six thousand insurgents from the Turkish provinces: a fact, this last, highly indigestible for those who contend that rebellions in Turkey are not sustained by natives, but by foreigners. The entire Turkish force directed against Tsernagora is stated at the enormous total of one hundred and thirty thousand. It was, of course, chiefly Asiatic.
It will be observed that the whole of these figures are taken from a work on the Slavonic side. The author has had the best means of information; and the statements are written not for our information, but for that of the sober and studious Germans. They are such as might at first sight well provoke a smile of incredulity. Yet, strange to say, they are in pretty close conformity with the general, the nearly unbroken, tenor of a series of wars reaching over four centuries. This is the race which, when asked for tribute, offered stones; whose privations were such, that on one occasion, having taken some hundreds of Turkish prisoners, they gladly accepted in exchange the same number of pigs; who clothe the coward in the garb of woman, but whose women freely grasp the rifle in the hour of need; yet whose men of war weep like women for the dead prince they love; and whose fathers in 1484 carried the printing-press with them to the mountains.
What became of that printing-press? Probably, when, not long after the removal to the hills, a vast army of Ottomans penetrated to Cettinjé and burned the monastery, it perished in the flames. The act of carrying it there demonstrated the habits, and implied the hopes, of a true civilization. But those habits and those hopes could not survive the cruel, inexorable incidents of the position. Barbarous himself in origin, and rendered far more barbarous by the habitual tyranny incident of necessity to his peculiar position in these provinces, the Turk has barbarized every tribe about him, except those whom he unmanned. The race of Tsernagora, with their lives ever in their hand, have inhabited not a territory, but a camp; and camp life, bad at the best, is terrible in its operation when it becomes continuous for twelve generations of men. It was only a fraction of the brutality and cruelty of Turks that in course of time was learned by the mountaineers. But even that fraction was enough to stir a thrill of horror. Of the exposure of the heads of the slain I cannot speak so strongly as some, who appear to forget that we did the same
- ↑ Pp. 188-93.
