The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume IIStillman, William James
History
The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II
Stillman, William James
Journalists -- Biography; Stillman, William James, 1828-1901
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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