and if it deserted them they would find protection in the surroundings of the throne, as they generally did, activity in the Slavonic cause covering many sins against discipline.  During the lull after the defeat of Servia (to anticipate a little the course of my narrative), I made the acquaintance of the Russian General Tcherniaieff at an English watering-place.  We became great friends, for personally I have always liked the Russians, and he told me with no little glee how he had outwitted the Czar, who, learning that he intended to go to Herzegovina to fight, called him and made him swear that he would not go to “fight with those brigands, the Herzegovinians.”  He swore, and then went, evading the surveillance of the police and with a false passport, to Belgrade, where he gave himself to inciting the Servians to war, and, when Servia declared war the following spring, he commanded the army.  So he never came to Herzegovina or to Montenegro, and he was personally hostile to the Prince, as I found most Russian officers to be.  But he assured me that the Czar was bitterly opposed to the movement, and that if it had been suspected that he was going to the Balkans he would have been arrested.  The prudence of the Czar is always in danger of being nullified by the imprudence of his agents.

The pressure of the Turkish government on Montenegro became severe, and the Prince, in the failure of Servia to respond to the Montenegrin proposals to fight it out, was unwilling to take the responsibility of a war.  But the Sultan inclined to war so strongly that Raouf Pasha, who advised him that his army was not prepared for it, was recalled, partly on account of that advice, and partly because he declared that the insurrection was to a great extent justified by the bad government of Bosnia, and was replaced by Achmet Mukhtar, later the Ghazi, who came breathing flames and extermination.  The bands of Montenegrins were ordered to leave the frontier of the principality, and came down to the vicinity of Ragusa; and as the interest at Cettinje diminished I followed the war.  The winter set in with great and unremembered rigor, the refugees suffered the greatest misery, and many of the Turkish troops in the high mountain country died of exposure.  I saw deserters at Ragusa who declared that there would be very general desertion were it not that the troops were assured, and believed, that, if they deserted, the Austrian authorities would certainly send them back to their regiments.

Before this the “Times” had come to the conclusion that the movement had come to stay awhile, and I was informed that I should be henceforward placed in the position of its special correspondent.  As I had thoroughly mastered the field and enjoyed the confidence and friendship of the Prince, I had, as long as the war lasted, no rival on the English press.  The suffering amongst the families of the Herzegovinians, exiled almost en masse into Dalmatia and Montenegro, was very great; but the influence