Man does this run deeeep........

Career[edit]

Agent in the Balkans[edit]

Private adventurer[edit]

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1868

After resolving to leave Göttingen, Arthur and Lewis planned an adventure in Bosnia and Herzegovina starting immediately in August 1875. They knew that the region, a part of the Ottoman Empire, was under martial law, and that the Christians were in a state of insurrection against the BosnianMuslim beys placed over them. Some Ottoman troops were in the country in support of the beys, but mainly the beys were using mercenaries, the Bashi-bazouks, private armies recruited from anywhere, loosely attached to the Ottoman military. Large numbers could be assembled on short notice. Their notorious cruelty, which they practised against the natives, helped to turn the British Empire under Gladstone against the Ottoman Empire, as well as to attract Russian intervention at Serbian request, the very sequence of events that, when the region was under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, would result in world-wide conflagration. At the time of Arthur's and Lewis's initial adventure, the Ottomans were still trying to lessen the threat of intervention by placating their neighbors. Arthur sought and obtained permission to travel in Bosnia, even though at war, from its Turkish military governor.

The two brothers experienced little difficulty with either the Serbs or the Ottomans but they did provoke the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent the night in "a wretched cell." After deciding to lodge in a good hotel in Slavonski Brod on the border, having judged it safer than Bosanski Brodacross the Sava River, they were observed by an officer who saw their sketches and concluded they might be Russian spies. Politely invited by two other officers to join the police chief and produce passports, Arthur replied, "Tell him that we are Englishmen and are not accustomed to being treated in this way." The officers insisted and, interrupting the chief at dinner, Arthur suggested he should have come to the hotel in person to request the passports. The chief, in a somewhat less than civil manner, won the argument about whether he had the right to check the passports of Englishmen by inviting them to spend the night in a cell.^[24]

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