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Updated: May 3, 2025
It was an inspiration of genius to conceive the plan; it would require the boldest riders in the world to execute it. But notwithstanding the loss of Dargo, the year preceding, "Sultan Schamyl," as the mountaineers sometimes fondly called him, had attained to such an influence that he was now at the head of the largest force which had ever been mustered in the highlands.
Schamyl well knew that he could not retire by the way in which he had advanced.
After not a little hard fighting this was finally done at the point of the bayonet; but the Circassians retired, dividing the honors of the field with the enemy, for they carried off the guns. Dargo was taken, but not Schamyl. What then was to be done?
In imitation of the grades of office in the Russian armies, Schamyl established a difference of rank among his own chieftains. Three of his most eminent partisans received titles corresponding to those of generals; and a number of his murids, especially the chiefs of the murtosigators, were made captains.
His head-quarters Schamyl now established in Dargo, an aoul consisting of about seventy houses, and situated some fifty miles northwest from Akhulgo, in that part of Tchetchenia inhabited by the Itchkerians.
Himri, well situated as it was, was hurled into ruin by the artillery of the foe, and among its prostrate defenders lay Schamyl, with two balls through his body. He was left by the enemy as dead, and in after-years the mountaineers looked upon his escape and recovery as due to miracle. Schamyl was thirty-seven years of age when he became leader of the tribes.
"Schamyl is of middle stature; he has light hair, gray eyes, shaded by bushy and well-arched eyebrows, a nose finely moulded, and a small mouth. His features are distinguished from those of his race by a peculiar fairness of complexion and delicacy of skin: the elegant form of his hands and feet is not less remarkable.
Indeed the burning ruins of his own residence supplied the bivouac fires by which the weary soldiers cooked their evening meal, and then lay down to sleep. The next day the fight was renewed. Schamyl had retired with a force of about six thousand warriors to a height which commanded the aoul, and thence opened a fire upon the Russians with their own cannon, the trophies of former victories.
The aouls which refused to join their party were threatened with destruction; and if they persisted in their refusal, their flocks and herds were driven off, their lands and vineyards laid waste, and their habitations razed to the ground. From others whose fidelity was to be suspected, hostages were taken. Schamyl would allow of no neutrality; whoever was not for him was against him.
I went to Europe in 1851 to inspect fortifications and study the methods of guerrilla warfare which have been successfully used in the old world. I have pondered the uprisings of the slaves of Rome, the deeds of Spartacus, the successes of Schamyl, the Circassian Chief, of Touissant L'Overture in Haiti, of the negro Nat Turner who cut the throats of sixty Virginians in a single night in 1831.
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