We went out to see them defile past the Prince and his staff.

The poor fellows were in rags, and the bundles they carried on their backs contained everything they had in the world.
Wives and children in numbers followed or preceded, and to our attempts to show them little kindnesses they shrank from us as if we had been wolves, the children generally howling with fear when we offered them a biscuit or a coin.

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.

The Prince gave the inhabitants four days to choose whether they would stay and become his subjects or take all their possessions and go to Albania.

The most had decided to stay, when word was sent them from Spuz that all who accepted the protection of the Prince would be expelled and have all their property confiscated when the Turks returned, and many were frightened into revocation of their submission.