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.

The result was that I decided to go to Mostar and lay the facts before the consuls, who had been charged to form a commission to investigate and report on the state of things in Herzegovina.  I was joined by the correspondent of “Le Temps” and a Belgian engineer engaged on the new road beyond Seraievo, and we engaged a courageous coachman to drive us to the capital of Herzegovina, for timid people would not venture to make the journey, such was the anarchy of the country.  As far as Metcovich we were in Austrian territory, but there we fell into the Asiatic order of things, meeting a frontier guard of ragged Turkish regulars, to whom the visas on our passports seemed of small account, in view of their evident desire to regard us as enemies; and all along the road to Mostar we had the scowling faces of the native Mussulmans bent on us as we passed, and the few Christians we saw wore an air of harelike timidity.