The garrison record, with painful exactness, the terrible annals of the siege; what ravelin is deluged with the blood of assailants and of defenders; where mines have blown the counterscarp into the ditch, or shattered the salient angle of a bastion; what new quarter of the city is devastated by the cannonade; what much-prized life is taken; when the bread begins to fail; what false hopes of relief, or what exaggerated tidings of calamity, circulate among the citizens. These details, of overwhelming interest to every man at the moment, and printed indelibly upon his mind, bring to the distant observer but one confused and appalling panorama of suffering and of endurance, of courage and of despair.
The growing anxiety of the city appears in a second despatch of Starhemberg's, dated August 27. He still tells of attacks repulsed, of sorties boldly executed, and of mines discovered and foiled, but he acknowledges the need of succour. "We are losing many men and many officers, more from dysentery than from the enemy's fire, the deaths from that disease alone are sixty daily. We have no more grenades, which were our best defence; our guns are some of them destroyed by the enemy's fire, some of them burst before firing fifty rounds, from the bad material used by the founder; and the enemy, seeing they can hold their lodgments in the ditch with a few men, are massing great numbers on the counterscarp, to have a large force ready there for some extraordinary effort.... We await, therefore, your Highness's arrival with extreme impatience; for my own part not so much from a wish to be relieved as that I may have the honour of respectfully assuring your Highness of my obedience, being, as I am, your Highness's most humble and obedient servant, Starhemberg." The courtly bravado of the subscription is in strong contrast with the hurried postscript that follows:—"My miners tell me that they hear the enemy working beneath them under the Burg bastion; they must have run their gallery from the other side of the ditch, and there is no time to be lost." When this despatch was written, both sides believed that the supreme crisis was at hand.
The 29th of August was looked for as the decisive day. On that anniversary Stuhlweissenberg and Belgrade had fallen before the Ottomans.[10] Above all, on that day the strength of Hungary had been smitten, and her king, Louis, had died, before the hosts of the great Solyman, on the disastrous field of "The Destruction of Mohacs"—that battle which first opened Hungary and Austria to the invader.
But the 29th came and passed, with no general attack from the besiegers. A mine was sprung under the Burg ravelin, nearly completing the ruin of the work; and three or four hundred Turks attempted to establish themselves upon the remains, but were driven back again. Another mine was sprung by the Burg bastion, but no assault followed. From St. Stephen's considerable movement was noticed among the Turkish detachments on the left bank of the Danube, occasioned by the march of Lorraine's army.
In the camp murmurs and dissensions ran high. The Janissaries clamoured at their lengthy detention in the trenches. They openly accused the incapacity, or worse faults, of the Vizier. There seems little doubt but that he had it in his power to have overwhelmed the defenders by a general and prolonged assault, towards the end of August.
Ottoman leaders had known well how to avail themselves of the obedience and fatalist courage of their soldiers. Amurath IV., when he won back Baghdad from the Persians, Mahomet II., at the taking of Constantinople, had shown how cities could be won. Before the city of the Khalifs for three days, before the city of the Cæsars from a May sunrise till well nigh noon, had torrent after torrent of brave, devoted, undisciplined soldiers wearied the arms and exhausted the ammunition of the defenders, until the Janissaries arose, fresh and invincible for the decisive charge. Wave after wave of stormers, fed from inexhaustible multitudes, had rolled upon the besieged, and, like broken waves, had rolled back in ruin, until the last and greatest should burst in overwhelming force upon the breaches. Such an assault would have been surely successful against Vienna. But the Vizier, in vain security, pictured to himself the advantages of a surrender, which should preserve the city as a trophy of his conquest—the seat, perchance, of his sovereignty. The riches which he dreamed it to contain, he hoped to receive as his own spoil; not to yield as the booty of the army after a storm. So, while the decisive days passed, the signal for attack was delayed, except by small bodies upon single points, until the courage of his soldiers was dissipated and their confidence destroyed. On the contrary, the unexpected reprieve gave courage to the defenders. The Janissaries, on the other hand, impatiently invoked the appearance of the relieving army to end their sojourn in the trenches by the decisive event of a stricken field. Slowly, but at last, ere yet too late, that army was approaching.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] That is the Leopoldstadt over against Neuhausel, not the island suburb of Vienna.
[8] Together with forty-two guns and eight howitzers from the city arsenal. Among the Emperor's pieces were eleven gigantic mortars, described as 100, 150, and 200-pounders, but two hundred and fifty-three of the guns were smaller than 12-pounders.