Fraternity-Testvériség, 1949 (27. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1949-02-01 / 2. szám

8

TESTVÉRISÉG

scarcely 30 years of age at this time, Görgey when the war began had been absorbed in the task of introducing modern agricultural methods on his northern Hungarian estates. He joined the army to defend his country against foreign invasion and to fignt for the threatened March constitution, which had been sanctioned by Royal consent. Ideologically he stood considerably to the right of Kossuth; temperamentally and politically he followed the lead of Széchenyi (whom the specter of levo.ution had driven into insanity at the beginning of hostilities). Görgey and Kossuth were incompatible geniuses, and the chasm between the two men was to widen throughout the course of the war,until Kossuth from his exile openly accused Görgey of treason before the whole world. The charge was unjust, for the young general fought heroically but realistically: in contrast to the romantically inclined Kossuth, he judged the situation exclusively on the basis of the military situation and did not believe in staging a colossal Götterdämmerung. But in the autumn of 1848 Görgey considered the Hungarian cause far from lost. Within one month after the defeat of Schwechat, he had trained an army of 30,000 men on the upper Danube; after the fall of Budapest he used this new army to engage in a diversionary campaign through the mountainous north, which kept the Austrians from advancing upon Debrecen. When spring arrived, the Imperial Army was no farther than it had been at the beginning of January; when summer came, it was back on the western frontier where it had begun its invasion during the preceding winter. The unexpected success of the Hungarians was due to the victories of Generals Klapka, Percei, and Bem; but primarily to Görgey’s brilliant spring campaign, the technical aspects of which long served as a part of the standard curriculum in Western military academies. The other generals also had their full share of military glory: Klapka, a young ex-officere of the Imperial Guard, cleared the northeast of Austrian invaders from Galicia; Percei, a political general, expelled the Serbian insurgents from their fortified southern redoubt; Bern, a Polish exile and veteran of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign, drove the enemy, already reinforced by some Russian contingents, out of Transylvania. The crowning glory was Görgey’s recapture of the fortress of Buda by assault on May 21. General Hentzi, the Austrian commander of the fortress, was killed in the final attack but not before he had subjected the low- lying Pest side of the Danube to a barbarous artillery bombardment. Kossuth and his government now triumphantly re-entered the capital. Of all the European revolutionary movements the Hungarian alone had escaped defeat; only in Venice was Manin’s anti-Austrian government still maintaining itself in power.

The executive branch of the Hungarian Goverenment which re-entered Pest no longer considered itself as owing allegiance to the Haps- burg ruler. The events of the past half year had worked for increasing radicalization and defiance. The replacement of Ferdinand as Emperor by the young Francis Joseph during the preceding December had been interpreted by both sides as cancellation of the March constitution. The young Emperor’s new constitution, issued as an Imperial edict on March 4, 1849, had revoked the constitutional concessions granted the various subject peoples by his predecessor and reduced Hungary to a truncated province of the Hapsburg crown. Kossuth, who had begun his career as an upholder of the principles of constitutional monrachy, now came more and more under the influence of the extreme republican wing of his followers. This faction finally achieved such strength that, under the influence of the spring victories, Parliament dethroned the Hapsburg dynasty and elected Kossuth Governor-President. The act of dethronement was voted by the Assembly on April 14 in the Calvinist Great Church of Debrecen, and althougth no republic was proclaimed, the new government was de facto republican. Hungary now presented the unique spectacle of an island set in a sea of eastern despotism but proudly displaying the democratic insignia of America and France. The spectacle was to be short-lived. Tsar Nicholas I and Francis Joseph were meeting in Warsaw and, in the interest of the European status quo, the eastern autocrat showed himself willing to grant his western collegaue military aid for the suppression of his rebellious Hungarian subjects. As a result of the meeting in June 1849, a Russian army of 194,000 men crossed the Carpathians into Hungary. At the same time several Austrian Army corps, totaling 176,000 men, advanced upon the Hungarian capital from the west and south. Against these 370,000 men, equipped with 1,200 cannon, stood the defending Honvéd army of 152,000 men and 450 cannon.

Görgey attempted the impossible. On July 11 he gave battle to the advancing Austrians near Komárom and personally led a desperate cavalry attack of 40 Hussar squadrons against the unyielding lines of the enemy. He received a head wound and directed the epic retreat of his army from a supply wagon, sinuously winding between the converging lines of the Austrian and Russian Armies. The retreat lasted from July 12 to August 4 in the direction of Szeged, whither the Government had fled in the meantime and where the remaining armies were to take a united last stand while a negotiated peace could still be arranged. But by the time Görgey reached Szeged, he found no armies with which to merge. Bern’s Transylvanian army had been dispersed by the Russians in the two sanguinary battles of Segesvár (Ju-