One pope, Milo, a hero of the earlier war, rode up and down
before the Turkish outposts, repeating every day his challenge, and at
last the Turks hid a squad of sharpshooters where he used to ride, and
brought him down with a treacherous volley, then cut off his head and
sent it in to the Prince.
Our guns were not heavy enough to cope with those of the fortress, and
so we passed the time shelling the redoubts thrown up on the little
hillocks around the town, alternating these operations with an
occasional assault of one of the nearest of them when the men got
impatient for some active movement. Meanwhile we learned that the
Russian government was sending us four heavier guns, sixteen and
thirty-two bronze rifled breech-loaders, the heaviest we had being
ten-pound muzzle-loaders against a battery of field guns, Krupp steel,
breech-loading twelve-pounders. The Russian guns were landed on the
Dalmatian coast below Budua and carried across the narrow strip of
Austrian territory which separated Montenegro from the sea, between
two lines of Austrian troops, lest some indiscreet traveler should
reveal the violation of neutrality, and were brought to Niksich, about
forty miles, on the shoulders of a detachment of Montenegrins over a
roadless mountain country, no other conveyance being possible.
CHAPTER XXXII
A JOURNEY INTO THE BERDAS
Pending the arrival of the guns, I explored the more remote and by
no traveler hitherto visited section of the Berdas, charged by the
Russian Red Cross and the English committees with the distribution of
a considerable sum of gold amongst the wounded and families of the
killed in that section.
Pages:
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218