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,