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.