CHAPTER I SOME REVELATIONS

Through Dalmatia to Herzegovina—Over the Balkan watershed—Bosnia and Sarayevo—A half-Turkish, half-Servian town—Austrian persecution of the Christians—Some astounding facts—A land of spies and scandals—The police as murderers—A disgrace to European civilisation.

In the darkest hour before daylight I bade farewell to my friend Mr. Charles des Graz, the British Chargé d’Affaires in Cettinje, and mounting into the pair-horse carriage, left the Montenegrin capital to descend that most wonderfully engineered road over the face of the bare mountains to Cattaro, on my way to Herzegovina and Bosnia.

Though still dark, Cettinje was already stirring, and as I drove through the long main street, armed men who were my friends saluted me, and shouted “S’bogom!” My driver and myself were armed too, in case of “accident,” yet the Montenegrin roads are quite safe nowadays, thanks to the pacific and beneficent rule of His Royal Highness Prince Nicholas.

Our eight-hour journey through the mountains was full of interest. Over those bare, tumbled limestone rocks, devoid of herbage and wild to the extremity of desolation, came the first rosy flush of dawn, and as we watched, the sun gradually dispelled the greys into yellows and golds in all the glory of the bursting of an autumn day. First, over the great plateau on which Cettinje is situated; then up the bare face of the mountain in a series of zigzags with acute angles; up, higher and higher, where the wind cut one’s face like a knife; and higher still, where we got out to walk, and so lighten the horses and warm ourselves. I gave my driver a pull at my flask, for the temperature was below zero, and we were both cramped and cold. Even through my leather-lined motor-coat the wind cut like a knife, chilling me to the bone.

At the summit a glorious view, one more wonderful, perhaps, than any in the whole of the Balkans. On the one side in the far blue distance the Accursed Mountains of Albania, where dwelt my friend Vatt Marashi and his fearless men, and on the other, away down in the rolling mists, lay what looked like a series of lakes, but which in reality was the wandering arm of the Adriatic, the magnificent fjord called the Mouths of Cattaro—the Bocche di Cattaro.

Here we struck the single telegraph-wire which places remote Cettinje in connection with the rest of the civilised world, and then the pace of our rough mountain horses showed that we were descending. Far below were a number of scattered houses, the little town of Nyegush, the chief edifice of which is the unpretentious palace of the Prince, and for a full hour and a half we wound down and down ere we reached its main street and pulled up at the inn for half an hour to get some coffee and to rest the horses.

Cramped and half-frozen as I was, the big steaming bowl of coffee was indeed welcome. Then, after scribbling some postcards to friends in England, I went for a brisk walk, took a photograph or two, and returned, just as the horses were being reharnessed.

Down again, ever down, past a great dark cavern, and on until we came to the row of stone slabs set in the road that marks the frontier between gallant little Montenegro and her enemy Austria. And then, what a view! Surely the most superb in all Europe!

Our old familiar tourist-Switzerland, the toy-Tyrol, the Norwegian fjords, the trumpery-Apennines, and the high Balkans are full of magnificent scenery, but for a picturesque combination of blue sea and sheer bare mountain nothing that I have ever seen—and I have knocked about Europe, I believe, as much as most men—equals that view from the Montenegrin road.

Bunaquelle: Bosnia.

Jajace: Bosnia.

All is beautiful—all save that frowning fortress which the Austrians have lately constructed to command the road, and which it is strictly forbidden to photograph under pain of imprisonment as a spy. I, however, risked it, and took another picture, which turned out rather well.

In Cattaro, being the bearer of despatches for His Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Office in London, and being therefore armed with a laisser-passer, my baggage was not examined, and at one o’clock I again boarded the same steamer which had brought me from Trieste, the Graf Wurmbrand, bound for Gravosa—which is the port for Ragusa, in Dalmatia.

Ragusa I found a quaint, mediæval place, reminding me strongly of one of those old towns on the Italian Riviera—I mean those unfashionable ones, at which the train stops and nobody gets out—ones that you only visit if you are motoring from Monte Carlo along to Genoa. It is a town of ponderous walls, of narrow streets, and queer dark byways. Across its dry moat and through its ancient gateway carriages do not pass, and as soon as you are in the main street you are out of it again, and passing through a water-gate are upon a small quay.

Difficult it is to realise that this quiet, old-world town, where everyone speaks Italian, was once the great port of the Balkan hinterland in the days when Venice was Queen of the Seas. And yet to the antiquary it is pleasant to stroll in and out of the old sixteenth-century churches, the Rector’s Palace, and the rest, to examine the mediæval Onofrio fountain, and to spend a day, as I did, among the architectural relics of an age bygone and long forgotten.

While there it rained for the first time after the long dry season. And if you have ever been in Italy—or anywhere, indeed—in the extreme south of Europe on the first day of the rainy season, you will know what I mean when I say it was not a mere shower. Water came down in sheets, and for a whole day and a whole night it never ceased, while the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed and echoed in the chain of mountains behind the town.

Palms and oranges grow in profusion in Ragusa, while across on the beautiful island of Lacroma—which legend connects with Richard Cœur de Lion—is vegetation more luxuriant than even upon the French Riviera. Prince Mirko of Montenegro, Colonel Constantinovitch, his father-in-law, and a number of wealthy people, mostly Austrians, have fine winter villas outside the town, and life there in spring is said to be quite charming.

Many yachts call there during the season, and there is opera at frequent intervals. Zara, Spalato, and Lussinpiccolo are all favourite winter resorts of the Austrians and Hungarians, but none is so smart or so select as Ragusa, which, by the way, has its hotel, the Imperial, where the charges equal, if not quite eclipse, those of the best hotels at Nice or Monte Carlo, while the cooking is inferior.

For the owner of a pretty villa overlooking the sea who desires to spend a quiet, healthful winter, Ragusa may be pleasant, but I confess it struck me as a particularly dull little town—a place so full of faded glory as to be painful.

The journey from Gravosa across Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Hungary to Servia I found tedious, though mostly through fine wild mountain scenery. I performed it partly by road and partly by rail, making Mostar and Sarayevo—the Bosnian capital—my halting-places.

The rail, a narrow-gauge one with a single train a day, starts from Gravosa at five o’clock in the morning and first ascends the Ombla valley from the sea. Gradually it rises in a series of zigzags over the grey bare rocks and through many tunnels for sixty miles to Gabela, a little mountain town, and then through the dry beds of a series of great lakes, and across barren plateaux until it descends into the valley of the Narenta, which narrows into a series of dark, romantic defiles, while the mountains grow higher and more wild, until Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, is reached.

Mostar is a rather dull little town on the Narenta, still half-Turkish, with its mosques and bazaar where one can obtain inlaid silver work from Livino. But there was certainly nothing to attract, so I pushed on next day to Sarayevo. Between the two capitals the scenery is superb, indeed some of the grandest in the whole of the Balkans. Through the Great Defile, or Gorge of the Narenta, the train slowly wends its sinuous course beneath the high precipices of Velez, and then through the Prenj Mountains, across the Glogosnica valley to the small garrison town of Jablanica, a lonely little place in a very wild district.

Twenty miles farther on we came to Konjica, a picturesque little place with a fine old Turkish bridge spanning the Narenta, where the train halts, affording us time to explore the place and take a photograph or two. Then the ascent is so steep that the puffing little locomotive is fitted with cog-wheels to take us through the Trescanica valley up over the ridge of the wild Ivan Planina, the high watershed between the Black Sea and the Adriatic.

Progress is slow and halts are frequent. In places there have been landslips, and we creep along the edges of dangerous precipices. But the scenery fully compensates for the many tedious hours and for lack of food—for in our ignorance I had omitted to lay in stores, and the only thing I could obtain during the day was half a dozen apples! The Bosnian frontier crossed, the train traverses the saddle of Vilovac, then descends rapidly through beautiful wooded valleys and along the Bosna and Zeljeznica rivers, until, in the darkness, Sarayevo with its many electric lamps is reached—a railway journey even more interesting than the well-known Gothard route.

My fellow-passengers from Mostar were two. One was a Turkish gentleman who removed his slippers and sat cross-legged on the seat fingering his beads until the sundown, when he produced some sandwiches from the tail of his frock-coat, and slowly consumed them after his long fast since four o’clock that morning. The other was a particularly communicative Austrian gentleman, whom I recognised at once to be a spy.

Sarayevo, the Bosnian capital, is very Eastern, and, being so, is full of attraction for the stranger. There is a very fair old-fashioned hotel, the Europa, in the centre of the town, nearly two miles from the station. It is a city of mosques, the minarets of which were all gaily illuminated on the night of my arrival, producing a picturesque effect against the night-sky.

The place is prettily situated—a town of some forty thousand inhabitants, half Serb, half Eastern. Lying in the narrow valley, whence the river Milyacka bursts forth from a gorge just above the town, the dwellers by the riverside are mostly Austrian immigrants, while the natives have their houses and their mosques on the hillside. Every house has its own little garden, as in Servia, and of course the bazaar is the centre of trade, as in every town where the beslippered Turk still remains.

This charshiya, or bazaar, is a great labyrinth of dark, narrow, ill-paved alleys flanked with booths, where every trade, each with its particular quarter, is carried on in open view to the passers-by. The copper ware, silver filigree, and carpets are attractive, but most of the so-called Oriental goods are “fakes.” The place, though there is a variety of costume everywhere, is not half so attractive as Skodra, because of the Austrian bogey that pervades everything.

To buy specimens of Bosnian chiselled metal work it is best to go to the Government School of Industrial Art, where the finest pieces of workmanship may be seen in course of execution, and where the price asked is a fixed one, below that demanded either in the bazaar or in shops. The services for Turkish coffee in chiselled copper-gilt are of chaste and very elegant design, perfect marvels of patience in chiselling, and very appreciable to the Western taste in decorative art.

The chief feature of the bazaar is the Husref Beg Mosque, the finest in the town, to which, though an Infidel, I was granted admission. I of course put on overshoes, and made an interesting tour round with a priest who only spoke Turkish, so that I did not learn very much from him. Built about 1540, it is a fine spacious structure, with dome and high minarets, and in front, in the quiet old courtyard, is a fine old fountain for ablutions shaded by a very ancient lime tree. Before it, sit several Turkish pedlars in turbans selling rosaries, printed texts from the Koran, imitation otto-of-rose manufactured from geranium, European collar-studs, and other trifles.

Another industry peculiar to Bosnia is the inlay of gold and silver into bog-oak, or gun-metal, and many quaint little objects—boxes, bracelets, brooches, and belt-buckles—quite unique in England, may be purchased. The old silver filigree buttons displayed everywhere may also be used with advantage by ladies for hat-pins.

A stroll through the town shows at once the mixed character of the people, for all the names of streets are written up in three languages—Turkish, Croatian, and Serb. The noisy thoroughfares are crowded with Europeans, mixed up with baggy-legged men and veiled women, men in fezes in all stages of disintegration, while the Bosnian ladies wear the queerest head-gear I have ever set eyes upon. The hair is parted in the middle and brushed down straight, while upon it is stuck a tiny pork-pie cap of gaudy-coloured chintz or silk, edged with a thousand gilt sequins sewn closely together, the most ugly and most unbecoming head-dress imaginable. Yet it is evidently the mode, and is worn by European ladies in all other respects attired as one would find them in Vienna or in Budapest.

But this is Bosnia, and assuredly strange things happen here under the unjust rule of Austria.

Strangers seldom come to Sarayevo. In the heart of that mountainous region between the Save and the Adriatic, only approached from the south by that rack-and-pinion railway, or from the north by the one train a day from that un-get-at-able station in Slavonia, Bosnche-Brod, it is entirely shut away from European influence—or European eyes, for the matter of that—and quite off the track taken by strangers in the Balkans.

Indeed, I would never advise the intending traveller to take that route from Ragusa to Belgrade. Better by far take the steamer right up the Adriatic to Fiume, and thence by rail, as it is quicker, and much less fatiguing. I did not go to Bosnia, however, so much to see its capital as to obtain some idea of the present system of government there, and to hear from the lips of the people themselves the advantages, or disadvantages, of the rule of His Majesty the Emperor Francis Josef.

With many well-known men in Sarayevo I talked. I heard both sides. But I am bound to admit that some of the facts proved to me were utterly amazing, showing how ill and unjustly governed is both Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had read André Barre’s recent book, La Bosnie-Herzegovina, and had doubted the very serious and direct charges which he brings against the Austrian Administration.

Therefore I went to see for myself, to make inquiry, and to thoroughly investigate.

The opinion I formed, after analysing the many facts placed before me, is that the present oppressed state of Bosnia is surely a vivid object-lesson to Servia, where day by day Austria is endeavouring, by the most ingenious and unscrupulous forms of intrigue, to obtain a footing. This latter I will explain more fully in my chapters on the future of Servia. Suffice it here to say that poor struggling Bosnia is to-day helpless beneath the talons of the Austrian eagle, and that the administration is a shameful travesty of civilised rule.

The Serb population are more essentially the sufferers, and have been so ever since the Austrian occupation allowed by the Treaty of Berlin. Through the four centuries of the Turkish rule, the Christians were from time to time oppressed, and in return revolted, more particularly in 1850 and 1875; but the position of the Serbs to-day is very little better, if any, than it was before the Russo-Turkish War.

Indeed, it seems that the whole policy of Austria in Bosnia has been directed against the Servian Orthodox people. The Servian Mohammedans are not feared because of their ignorance, while their fatalism renders them docile. On the contrary, however, the local Government of Bosnia fears those professing the Orthodox faith, and, having established the Jesuits solidly in the country, have proceeded upon a course of systematic persecution. Austrian methods are too apparent all over the Balkans. Unscrupulous to a degree, her policy in Bosnia has been one of terror, of espionage, of famine, and of assassination. In truth it is accomplishing the moral and material ruin of a splendid country, the crushing of the noble Servian race which has, alas! fallen beneath its hand.

At first I was inclined to doubt. The Serb is a patriot, sometimes given to exaggeration. But very quickly, as the result of my inquiries, evidences of Austria’s evil rule were apparent on every hand. To go into a mass of detail is not within the province of this record of inquiry, neither do I wish to scream hysterical condemnations. I went to the Balkans, not for sight-seeing, but seeking to penetrate some of the mysteries of their politics, and their aims for the future. I travelled there in order to have audiences with the Kings, Princes, and Cabinet Ministers of the various countries in the Peninsula. These were granted me, and thus I obtained, at first hand, their views regarding the present situation, and their hopes and aspirations.

In Bosnia, both on the Mohammedan and Christian side, I found only a grave and grim story of misrule and oppression, which it may be well to briefly outline, in order to show how Austria rules the unfortunate country that falls beneath her dominion.

Under Austria, the Servian Orthodox Church is treated in a manner utterly inconceivable in this enlightened century. Neither trouble nor intrigue has been spared to separate the people from the Church. The metropolitans nominated by the Emperor have been alienated from the people, with the result that at Mostar the head of the Church is the object of unanimous derision. No one will attend his church if he is present, and on passing him in the streets they turn their heads or hiss. Again, in Sarayevo the metropolitan is regarded with equal disfavour. The old people refuse to receive the communion at his hands, and each day upon the walls of his house are posted insulting placards. To those who know the veneration with which the Serbs regard their metropolitans, such signs as these show the general demoralisation brought about by intrigue and the circulation of base calumnies. Not only are the people encouraged to treat the heads of the Church with contempt, but they are taught to hate the priests and to scoff at religion. And this by an Empire which has the miserable effrontery to call itself Christian!

Again, Saint Sava is, as is well known, the patron saint of the Servian Church. He is considered the protector of churches and schools, and all new churches in Bosnia and Herzegovina adopt for their slava, or festival, the day consecrated to Saint Sava, January 14 (O.S.). This day the Orthodox Serbs everywhere regard as a feast. In the morning there is a solemn service, and in the evening the young people assemble to sing national songs and dance national dances. But even this has been disapproved of by Austria, who regards the feast as preserving the national conscience. The Government commenced by prohibiting the second portion of the fête, and then gradually suppressing the first. Pressed by the authorities, the priests each 14th of January are suddenly taken so ill that they cannot perform the service, or else they are unavoidably absent from home on that day, so that no slava can take place. In this oppressed country every programme of a fête, no matter what, must first pass the censor, who prohibits the singing of the old Servian songs, and places a penalty upon anyone singing the “Hymn of Saint Sava,” which is purely a religious one. Again, in many cases the reply of the censor will arrive eight or ten days after the date of the festival. Indeed, in many places, the slava of private families—the domestic name-day feast which, to the Servian, surpasses in interest either Christmas or Easter—has actually been prohibited by the very enlightened local authorities! This happened in the arrondissement of Rielinski quite recently.

Of the history of the struggle of the Orthodox Church in Bosnia, or of the strenuous Catholic propaganda, it is unnecessary to speak. Let us deal with the present deplorable state of affairs, and with the future. Woe-betide any heard singing the patriotic song of the Prince of Montenegro, “Onamo ... Onamo,” for he will be punished severely. Spies are on every hand, and no man knows at any moment when he may be thrown into prison upon some fictitious charge. Austria, indeed, is endeavouring to civilise and subject Bosnia by continued oppression, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Press. Like in Russia, every word is subjected to the censor before printed. One buys the Musavat—the organ of the Serb Mohammedans in Herzegovina, printed at Mostar—and finds every paragraph bearing a number. There are many numbers with the spaces blank—suppressed altogether. Again, in the Servian Word, the organ of the Servian Orthodox in Bosnia, one finds the same thing—numbers and blanks.

This is not, perhaps, surprising when practically every organ of the Press is prohibited save the Government publications, of which the Bosniak—an amusing journal fabricated by amateur journalistic functionaries of the State—is a good example.

Among the hundred and four journals prohibited are most of the Servian newspapers, even commercial, religious, and literary reviews; a number of Hungarian journals, including the Dubrovnik of Ragusa; every Russian journal of whatever kind or description; and last, but surely not least, the Comments upon the Evangelists by the Metropolitan Firmilien!

Every book or newspaper entering Bosnia or Herzegovina goes through the censor’s office, while the postal employés note, and hand to the police, the names and addresses of the receivers of prohibited publications. So it is not only in Russia and Turkey where one cannot read a foreign journal, but here, under the enlightened rule of His Majesty the Emperor Francis Josef.

Bosnia is, truth to tell, an unknown land as far as the rest of Europe is concerned, and probably these facts may come as a complete surprise to English readers, who are apt to regard Austria as a Christian and progressive Power, instead of what she is, the Ogre of the Balkans.

To the injustices inflicted upon the peasantry, to their many grievances and their violated rights, I have not space here to refer. Under such rule as pertains, the wretched condition of the Serbs in the rural districts may well be imagined. As André Barre has truly said, “Austria entered Bosnia and Herzegovina, not for the purposes of reform, nor to civilise, but to satisfy a political desire, a military ambition to triumph over a people by slowly and methodically exterminating them.”

“J’ai mis le pied sur la tête du serpent,” said Count Andrassy, speaking to Lord Salisbury after the signature of the Treaty of Berlin. And those words give to-day the key to the Austrian policy. She seeks to crush the Serbs, not only in Bosnia, but in the kingdom of Servia itself, and to Germanise the whole land by steel and by hunger. And such is the present pitiable situation—a situation unrealised in England—a situation which has actually called forth the hostile criticism of the Vienna journals themselves—including the semi-official Neue Freie Presse—against the present barbarism of the occupation.

Any industry or commerce exploited by Serbs is at once crushed and ruined, while in the police we have vivid examples of corrupt maladministration only equalled in Russia. The police persecutions are scandalous. Many were related to me by persons who had themselves been victims. The Bosnian citizen beneath the claws of the police is utterly without defence. If the paternal Government of Austria attempt to deny this, let the recent cases of M. Gligorie Jeftanovitch of Sarayevo, M. Chola of Mostar, M. Stiepo Srchkitch, M. Ilia Duckovitch, M. Risto Maximovitch, M. Radoulovitch, M. Nikolas Pichkakutch of Banja-Louka, and the sad affair of Pierre Dorliatcha of Bosnia-Novi, amid a thousand others, be cited, to show what travesties of justice are performed in this remote corner of the Balkans. A whole volume, indeed, could be written upon the corrupt Austrian police methods which vie with those of Holy Russia. But it must suffice here to cite cases upon which no denial can be offered by the authorities.

The Austrian authorities, who are so glib with their semi-official denials and statements, which we see almost daily in the London newspapers, will have some difficulty in disproving the disgraceful incident at Sokolatz, near Sarayevo, not long ago. Here, during the Easter fête, the gendarmes were formed round the church “to maintain order.” A peasant saw one of the gendarmes endeavouring to outrage a young woman, and ran to inform the authorities. Whereupon the gendarme shot the peasant dead with his revolver. There was no inquiry regarding the murder, though witnessed by at least a hundred persons. And the official account of the affair—which I have myself seen—actually declares that the unfortunate peasant died a natural death!

This is but one single case of hundreds. All over the country the police and gendarmes shoot the witnesses of their crimes, and there is never an inquiry. Of a verity the barbarities of the police in Bosnia are a disgrace to a nation that calls itself civilised, and cry for reform quite as loudly as they do in the Land of the Tzar.

Let the reader who doubts this outspoken condemnation of Austrian administration go to Bosnia and see for himself. He will find that I have understated the facts, and things will be told him that surely will stagger belief.