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The terrible passes of the Duga offered ideal positions for a defense by such a force as the Montenegrin, brave, good shots, and absolutely obedient to orders; and the best military advice on our side pronounced them impregnable if properly defended.
It is commonly drawn by three horses a strong, fast trotter in the shafts, flanked on each side by a light, loosely-attached horse that goes along at a gallop. The points of the shafts are connected by the duga, which looks like a gigantic, badly formed horseshoe rising high above the collar of the trotter.
Simultaneously with the attack on Duga, the army of Ali Saib attacked on the south; but, defeated most disastrously two days in succession, was obliged to relinquish the effort to meet Suleiman in Danilograd, where, if united, they would have held the principality by the throat.
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.
This is called the duga, and is the most prominent object to be seen about every wagon, drosky, and kibitka in Russia. I am not sure but a species of veneration is attached to it. Often it is highly decorated with gilding, painted figures, and every vagary of artistic genius, and must cost nearly as much as the entire wagon.
To the top of the duga is attached the bearing-rein, and underneath the highest part of it is fastened a big bell in the southern provinces I found two, and sometimes even three bells which, when the country is open and the atmosphere still, may be heard a mile off. The use of the bell is variously explained.
Greene, came to Cettinje and visited the camp of Suleiman, in which visit I wished to imitate him, but he warned me that it would be probably a fatal call, as I would not have been allowed to return. Mr. Greene gave me Suleiman's account of the fighting in the Duga, in which the Turkish general described the Montenegrin attacks as displaying a courage he had never before witnessed.
With great ability, Suleiman out-manoeuvred Vucotich in the Duga, and debouched in the plain near Niksich before the Montenegrin army could reach Plamnitza, where the valley of the Zeta and our position at Ostrog were to be defended, and if Suleiman had pushed on without stopping to recruit he might have taken us all in our quarters.
Until I arrived at his camp Bozo had received no information of the passage of the Duga, nor of the relief of Niksich; but I had not been with him two hours before we saw the smoke arising from the villages on the northern slopes of the heights that commanded the head of the valley of the Zeta, which connects the plains of Niksich and Podgoritza and divides Montenegro into two provinces, anciently two principalities, the Berdas and the Czernagora or Black Mountain.
The long wagon-trains of lumber, and the occasional traveler’s tarantass rumbling along to the discord of its duga bells, were enveloped in a cloud of suffocating dust. Now and then we would overtake a party of Russian peasants migrating from the famine-stricken districts of European Russia to the pioneer colonies along this Turkestan highway.
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