Elez, turning to go, had turned back to speak again to Ahmet. The Dibra and the Mati had long been enemies, he said. There had been no friendship between them since the days of Scanderbeg. Was this not a time to forget that old enmity? In their mountains, Dibra had not understood the Tirana government. During those three days in Tirana, Elez said, he had learned many new things. He believed now that Ahmet Mati was fighting for Albania. Would Ahmet join him in abesaof peace between Mati and Dibra?
This had been entirely unexpected,Mr.Eyres said. However, Ahmet did not turn a hair. He and Elez made thebesaof peace, and then Elez added another thing. “I have heard,” he said to Ahmet, “that you intend to disarm the men of Dibra. You have not expected to do that without fighting. Now I, Elez Jusuf, chief of the Dibra, say this: The Serbs hold our city of Dibra. The Serbs are on the lands of my people. Twice in this year the Serbs have cometo kill our men and burn our villages. Only our rifles stand between us and the Serbs. But you are the chief of Albania and you are a wise chief. When you think it is time to come to the Dibra to take away the rifles of the Dibra, I will give you every rifle. There will be no trouble. I say this, on the honor of Dibra.”
Even this, toMr.Eyres’s deeper astonishment, did not cause Ahmet to turn that hair. He said merely, “That is well.” The interview was ended. On the way back to his men, Elez suggested toMr.Eyres that he leave his son as hostage to insure that he had spoken the truth. If he broke thebesa, he said, in a matter-of-fact manner,Mr.Eyres might kill his son. MisunderstandingMr.Eyres’s reaction to this offer, he added that his son would be glad to make his life a forfeit for the honor of Dibra. “But what on earth would I do with the chap?” saidMr.Eyres to us. “Bless my soul, I know old Elez will keep his word! Well, rather! I told the old man to jolly well take his son along with him. By the way, the young Elez has two lads of his own here in this school. Asked me to give them greeting from him, said he was sorry he couldn’t stop to see them. Elez’s riding out on the Dibra trail by this time, I expect.”
The young secretary of the absent Prime Minister came at that moment to confirm this conjecture. The crisis was over. Albania, we said, was saved once more. If the uprising had been—who could say?—an Italian plot, Italy wascheckmated again. There would be no new outbreak in the Balkans this time, and that precarious balance in all European politics, the Balkan equilibrium, was unchanged. We were saying this, and I was thinking of the two Austrian engineers riding behind the retreating Dibra men on their quest for electric lights for Tirana, when the second blow fell upon us.
The Red Cross mail car, gone that morning to meet the Italian steamer at Durazzo, returned with the news that Hamid Bey Toptani, brother of Essad Pasha, had taken Durazzo. He was an hour from Tirana, coming on the Durazzo road, with at least six hundred armed men. How many more were hidden in the hills when the automobile passed, no one could guess. Under the American flag, the car had gone and come through the lines, and no secret had been made of the fact that Tirana would be attacked that night.
There is a point at which human nerves cease to report emotion. For three days and nights we had felt all that we are capable of feeling. We heard this news blankly, understanding it, thinking about it, and hardly caring. There was no resilience left in us with which to care. It was like beginning again a story we had once read.
“Where did Hamid Bey Toptani get his arms?” I asked. For the Toptani family are not mountaineers, nor chiefs of mountaineers. The peasants on the great estates of the plains do not carry rifles.
“There is an Italian gunboat in the harbor of Durazzo, and another at San Giovanni,” said the American who had gone with the mail.
“It does look like a well-organized plan,” we said. Scutari attacked, Elbassan attacked, Durazzo taken, Tirana attacked from the west and from the east. A plot, in which only one small thing had gone wrong. Had old Elez Jusuf, tricked by his two friends into involving the Dibra, come too early to Tirana? Had Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra intended to bring the Dibra men from the east when Hamid Bey Toptani came from the west? Was it because the plan miscarried that they had urged Elez Jusuf to sit intrenched in Tirana, while they hoped that Toptani would come in time to help them take Government House? Or had the Dibra men come on time, and Toptani purposely delayed, to leave the hard fighting in Tirana to the Dibra men?
Futile questions, for we could not know the answers. And our thoughts settled upon Ahmet, three days and nights without sleep or rest, the one man who was the government, sitting alone in Government House with the checkerboard of this situation before him. How well he had moved the pieces! Bringing in the British minister, to give him time to bring in his fighting men. Settled, in his mind, that to-day must remove Elez Jusuf, though he burned half Tirana to do it. And sending out, ten minutes behind Elez, those two engineers to plan electric lightsfor the capital! To plan electric lights for the city that—surely he knew it—Hamid Bey Toptani would attack that night. Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati, come from the court of Abdul Hamid when sixteen years old, to fight the Serbs in the mountains. The chiefs of the Mati must lace his opangi before every battle, because he did not know how to lace opangi. But the chiefs of the Mati loved him.
Two horses went cantering past the windows of the Red Cross dining room, and because the clatter of horse’s hoofs is rare in Tirana they must be bringing news. From the gateway of the courtyard we watched them—a rider in the Mati costume, leading a lean, eager bay horse. They went through the gate to Government House. In a moment they reappeared, Ahmet Bey Mati riding the bay. He still wore the clothes in which I had seen him; rumpled a little, they spoke of the sleepless nights, and his face was white with fatigue. On his head an astrakan fez; over his shoulder the strap that held a rifle; around his waist the cartridge belt, and a belt holding silver-hilted revolver and knives. A strange figure, in tailored business suit, riding the lean bay through the streets of Tirana. Behind him, coming with the long swinging walk of the mountaineers, perhaps sixty Mati men.
“Long may you live,zonya!” said he, touching the astrakan fez in salute.
“Long may you live, Ahmet Mati!”
They rode past the pictured mosque, down thestreet of little shops and cafés, closed now, past the cemetery with its toppling turbaned gravestones. At the barracks they stopped. For a moment Ahmet spoke with the chiefs who gathered around his horse. Then he rode on, out on the road to Durazzo, and behind him went his hundreds upon hundreds of fighting men. It was the sunset hour; the mountains and the sky were beautiful, and the little owl was beginning to call from the Cypress of the Dead. The prayers of thehodjisrose to Allah from the tops of the white minarets.
The moon was late that night, and mountains and plains were covered with darkness when the rifles began to crackle on the hills. Little flames of rifle fire ran along the tops of the hills like flickering lightning. It was as though the hills were crackling with electricity.
We stood in the courtyard of our house, watching them. Government House was dark; the engine was no longer running. The little owl called from the Cypress of the Dead. Sied Bey came through the gate and said to us in French that he feared there would be trouble again in Tirana that night; might the women and children of his family stay in the Red Cross house? There was his old mother, who was ill; his sister, and many children of his brothers and his cousins, little children. They had come in that day from his estate, where the fighting was. Did we think the Red Cross would give them shelter till morning, under the American flag?
They came behind him, through the darkness, and we said we would take them to the Vocational School. Sied Bey could not leave his post at Government House. There were the two veiled women, and nine women servants carrying rolls of bedding, and so many little girls in voluminous trousers, with chains of gold coins on foreheads and necks, and so many very small boys in Turkish trousers and Scanderbeg jackets, that we never counted them. We got them all into the Red Cross dining room, where there was space for them to sleep on the floor, and we offered them cigarettes and coffee. Within the dining room the sound of the rifle fire was no louder than the soft crackling of burning wood.
The older woman, worn and wrinkled and pale with illness, sat on the cushions arranged for her by a servant, accepted the cigarette which another servant had put in a long jeweled holder, and smoked silently. But the younger one, throwing back her veil with a violent movement, startled us by the revelation of a strong, beautiful face and eyes full of anger. She spurned the cushions, she walked up and down like a furious animal in a cage.
“Pardon me,” she said, suddenly, in perfect English. “Forgive me. You are good to shelter my mother. But I—but I am not made to stay here, to stay here in a house, when there is fighting. Do you hear the rifles?” She struck her clenched hand against the edge of the table, and blood came on the knuckles. She walked up and down.
“Do you think I cannot fight?” she said. “Ask my brother. Ask the Serbs if I can fight. There is not a man in Albania who knows a rifle better than I. They did not keep me in a house when the Serbs came! I was out on the hills with the men when the Serbs came. And now—now when traitors, when men who sell their honor for money, are murdering Albania, I must sit in a house! I must sit on a cushion!” She stamped on the cushion. “I, who have killed nineteen Serbs with these hands! I must stay with my mother, because she is ill. Let Sied stay with my mother. I have a rifle; I want to fight! Do you hear the rifles?”
We were appalled. We were speechless before that infuriated woman who had killed nineteen Serbs with her hands. We went away, leaving her walking up and down, while her mother silently smoked and the children watched from their heaps of rugs.
In the street by the gate of Government House Sied Bey was watching the sky to the northwest. Five red flares were there now, and the rifle fire was running like flickering lightning over the western hills.
“It is too bad my sister is not there,” he said. He was proud of her. “My sister was a lion when the Serbs came in. There is no man better than my sister in a battle.”
He had not taken his gaze from the red flares. “Five villages,” he said as though to himself. “This morning I wasseigneurof those fivevillages, and to-night they are burning.Eh bien,” he said. “They were rebels, then, my peasants. They were sheltering Hamid Bey. Their villages must be burned.”
The rifle fire went away over the hills. It wrote on the darkness as it went that Hamid Bey Toptani was retreating. Then the moon rose over the eastern mountains, and Tirana was white in the moonlight, and there was no sound except the flowing of water in the gutters and the calling of the little owl in the cypress.
In the morning, all Tirana gathered silently about the strangest sight ever known in that youngest city of Albania, which remembers only three hundred years. Workmen were in the cemeteries. Groups of ragged workmen walked upon the graves, loading the turbaned gravestones on wheelbarrows, wheeling them away and dumping them beside the Durazzo road. There were wooden plows, drawn by oxen, going over the Mohammedan graves, plowing down the weeds. Ahmet Bey had given orders, before he left Tirana, that all the old sacred cemeteries be made into public parks. The sensation was profound. All day long a mass of fezzes surrounded each cemetery. Their wearers said nothing, said not one word; they stood and watched, silently. The workmen worked silently. The only sound was the grating of levers on tombstones, the crunching sound of the plow on the graves.
There was no news from Durazzo.
In the afternoon, another surprise for the citizensof Tirana. Three hundred men were working on the Durazzo road. They began where the road turns, beyond the barracks. With plows they went up and down the road, many times. Ahmet had said that the road must be plowed deeply. Ahmet had said that the road must be made slightly rounded, broad, with ditches on either side. Men were digging the ditches. And two by two, along the road, men were sitting facing each other, a hard rock between their knees and hammers in their hands. Rhythmically striking, they were breaking into little fragments the old turbaned gravestones from the cemeteries. Heaps of the broken rock grew around them. Farther down the Durazzo road more rocks were being piled ready for them to break. Donkeys were carrying these rocks from the river bed east of Tirana.
At sunset Tirana went out to walk, and there was that sight. No longer a road to walk upon, but havoc of plowed ground and broken stones. Ahmet Bey Mati had said that there must be a stone road from Tirana to Durazzo, forty miles. The road was following him on the way he had gone to fight Hamid Bey Toptani. There was still no news from that fight.
The people said, “Ahmet Bey Mati,” in a strange tone. Partly amazed, partly awed, partly colorless shock. They said, “Ahmet Bey Mati,” but the placards that men were tacking to the Cypress of the Dead were signed simply, Ahmet Zogu. He no longer called himself a bey;he no longer used even the Turkish title given his family when Scanderbeg was dead and the family became Mohammedan, the title which changed the old name, Zogu, to Zogolli. The placards said that Tirana was under military law; all shops and cafés would be closed, and no one walk on the streets, after nine o’clock. Signed, Ahmet Zogu.
At nine o’clock not a light showed on the streets and no footsteps were heard on the cobbles. Ahmet Bey Mati had become an awful invisible figure, a sort of limitless and incomprehensible power, in the darkness over Tirana. There was still no news from Durazzo.
Next morning the telegraph wire from Durazzo began again to click the instrument in the room above the post office. Orders were coming from Ahmet Bey Mati. Among them, orders that we should have guides, horses, and interpreters for our trip to the mountains; a message to us that the chiefs of Mati and Merdite, and the prefect of Scutari, had been advised of our coming and would give us all facilities. On the wire the operators talked, and travel was again open on the Durazzo road. News poured upon us.
Hamid Bey’s forces had been routed and scattered; Hamid Bey’s family had escaped on an Italian gunboat; Hamid Bey had been pursued, turned back on the very shore where a boat waited for him, was being hunted northward through the mountains. Three men had been hanged at Shijak, and thehanthere, which hadbeen Hamid Bey’s headquarters, was burned. Durazzo had made no resistance to Ahmet. Ahmet had fined Durazzo five thousand napoleons—twenty thousand dollars—to punish it for not resisting Hamid Bey. Tirana was fined five thousand napoleons for not helping the government when the Dibra men came in. Ahmet Bey had arrested twenty-nine men, who would be tried in court for treason. Five villages on Sied Bey’s estate were ashes, the families homeless. Hamid Bey’s property was confiscated; his country house would be burned. Byram Gjuri had fled to Belgrade. Scutari had not been attacked. Zija Dibra would be taken to-morrow to Durazzo, to be put on a steamer for Constantinople. All Albania was quiet.
That day I met on the street His Excellency Spiro Koleka, Minister of Public Works, who had called upon us in the night when the government was fleeing from Tirana. “Vous voyez, madame,” said he, triumphantly, “Je vous ai dit la vérité. Tout est tranquil.”
There is no more to this tale. This was the end of the March rebellion of 1922, which for a week was one of the lighted fuses to the powder magazine of Europe. It was lighted—I can only guess by whom—and was stamped out by a chief of the Mati mountaineers, in Albania. A little country, which no one knows. Albania—somewhere in the Balkans, isn’t it? Or is it in the Caucasus? One of those places that are always having revolutions, people fighting among themselves.Ought to have sense enough to settle down and go to work.
There is no more to this tale. Our trip to the mountains is not part of it. Only a few more pictures come into my mind, when I remember those days in Tirana.
Picture of Ahmet Zogu, riding back from Durazzo. Riding the tired bay horse, at the head of his Mati men. Riding through a silent crowd which silently parted to let him pass. Rifle and revolver, knives and cartridge belt, gone. The gray business suit cleaned and pressed. A white face, and darkness under the eyes, and eyes that see straight to the end of things. Soft tramping of feet in rawhide opangi behind him, and the Mati men in dingy black-braided trousers and colored sashes and Scanderbeg jackets, rifles all-angled above their kerchiefed heads, pouring down the narrow street. Then lumbering behind them, dust filmed and mud splashed, the empty automobile of the Albanian government, gone forty miles to Durazzo to fetch Ahmet and come back empty because he would ride at the head of his men. It goes last through the gates of Government House, and the crowd can gaze only at the gate and its solitary guard.
Picture of Ahmet in his house. He sits in a gilded Louis Seize chair, under a painted Turkish ceiling. Half a hundred rifles, museum pieces he has chosen from the long mule trains of rifles brought down to Tirana as the mountain tribes are disarmed, are stacked behind his chair. Abox telephone on the wall, an English grammar on the table, a Mati man lying on the threshold of the door. Ahmet saying: “Albania needs men, needs trained men. What am I, with power in my hands that I cannot use because I am ignorant? I do not know Europe, America. Tirana needs factories, Albania needs industries. The people are starving and ragged; they walk with bare feet over the earth that covers their fortunes. We need capitalistic development, not a hundred years from now, but to-day. I am no good for that. How can we handle this? You are from America. Can you tell us? Oil, mines, forests, water power, land—what can Albania do with them, without trained men?”
Another picture, a little one. Ahmet smiling. “Ah, but you wouldn’t have been surprised if you had known, as I did, the men who were the rebels. They were rich men. I thought, ‘Not all will be killed in the fighting; we will capture some, arrest others. Why try them and hang them? Their money will be more useful than their bodies. We will try them and fine them.’ I thought how much money they had, and decided there was enough money there to pay for electric lights for Tirana, so naturally I sent for engineers to go out as soon as the Dibra trail was clear.”
“You had no doubt that you’d clear the trail?”
“I had no time to doubt. I was busy clearing it.”
And a last picture, always to be rememberedby those who know Tirana. It is the sunset hour, and all Tirana goes walking in the colored evening air. Tirana goes walking down the smooth Durazzo road, the road that is white and firm beneath the feet, from the turn beyond the barracks all the way to the sea. The Cabinet Ministers of Albania go walking in a row, sedately, their hands behind their backs, and in the middle walks Ahmet Zogu, elected by Parliament Prime Minister of Albania. Six even paces behind them marches their escort, a single row of soldiers.
The eastern mountains are catching the last light of the sun and making magic with it. Plum purple, orange gold, mauve and violet and blue, the colors shift and change, and the air is faintly golden over the green plains where the mountain men are gathering as they used to gather in the evenings long before Athens was built. Holding hands in long lines, moving in a stamping circle, they are singing songs improvised by their leader, who, with a handkerchief in his hand, acts in pantomime the verses he creates. The strange, wild song in which they have clothed and preserved the tales of all their heroes of two thousand years is heard far over the green plains, where flocks of sheep are coming home with little tinkling of bells.
“Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey! [they sing].Ahmet, the Son of the Mountain Eagle!His wings spread out and cover us,The shadow of his wings is over us,His claws are terrible to our foes.Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!The men of Dibra came with their rifles,Elez Jusuf, the chief of the Dibra,Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra,The Toptani family, curse of Albania,Hamid Toptani, with nine hundred soldiers,Nine hundred soldiers armed by Italians,Came from Durazzo to murder Albania.Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!“Elez Jusuf goes back to the Dibra,Besaof peace he has given to Ahmet.Hamid Toptani flees through the mountains,Cursed be the trees that give him hiding.Zija Dibra is sent to Stamboul,Zija Dibra, exiled from Dibra.Five thousand napoleons, fine of Durazzo,Five thousand napoleons, fine of Tirana.Five villages burned. Let the market place tellNames of the men who were hanged there at dawn.“Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! O! Ahmet Bey!He set three hundred men to work on the roads,He built a good road from Tirana to Durazzo,He makes electric lights in the capital of Albania.O! O! Ahmet Bey, the Beautiful! O! Ahmet Bey!”
THE END