[15] Schimmer, "Sieges of Vienna;" Count Thürheim, "Life of Starhemberg;" and Salvandy, "Hist. de Pologne," p. 172, vol. ii. misplace this solemn benediction of the army and the knighting of Prince James on the morning of the 12th. Sobieski's own testimony, in his letters to his queen, is decisive for the 8th. Nor on the 12th was there time for the ceremony.
CHAPTER VI.
There was no time to be lost indeed. The fortifications of Vienna were a mere heap of ruins. The Imperial Palace was battered to pieces. Nearly one whole quarter of the city was in ashes. On the 3rd of September, the long contested Burg ravelin was yielded to the Turks. On the 4th, the salient angle of the Burg bastion was blown into the air, and an attack was with difficulty repelled. On the 6th, a similar mine and assault following cumbered the Löwel bastion with ruin and with corpses. For a moment, the horse tails were planted upon the ramparts. Driven back thence with difficulty, the Turks still clung to the Burg ravelin, and four pieces of cannon planted there, at frightfully close quarters, completed the ruin of the works. But no new attack came. Informed of the advance of Lorraine, though still incredulous of the presence of Sobieski, the Vizier began to draw his troops towards the foot of the Kahlenberg. He still clung to the batteries and trenches; still kept the pick of his Janissaries grappling with the prize which but for him they might have already won. He rejected the advice of the Pasha of Pesth, to withdraw across the Wien and fortify a camp on the Wienersberg, secure that if the Christians attacked and failed Vienna would fall. He withdrew his troops indeed from the Leopoldstadt, and threw up some slight works towards the Kahlenberg, but remained otherwise irresolute, halting between his expected booty and her deliverer.
Sobieski had already taken the measure of his opponent. In reply to desponding views of Lorraine at Tuln, he had said, "Be of good cheer; which of us at the head of two hundred thousand men would have allowed this bridge to have been thrown within five leagues of his camp?" To his wife he wrote, "A commander who has thought neither of entrenching his camp, nor of concentrating his forces, but who lies encamped there as if we were one hundred miles off, is predestined to be beaten." Viewing the Turkish force from the Kahlenberg, he said to his soldiers, "This man is badly encamped, he knows nothing of war; we shall beat him."
It was well for the Christians and for Vienna that none of the great warriors who had served the Porte was now in command. No man like Kiuprili, or even like Ibrahim "the Devil," the last Turkish commander against whom Sobieski had contended, was there, to use the fidelity of the Janissaries and the valour of the Spahis to advantage. The march up the defiles of the Kahlenberg presented, even without interruptions, extraordinary difficulties. The king himself pushed forward to superintend the exploration of the way. He was so long parted from his Polish troops that they became anxious for his safety. He rejoined them at mid-day on the 11th, and encouraged them as they marched, or, as he says, rather climbed to the summit. Some Saxon troops, first arriving, with three guns, opened fire upon a Turkish detachment marching too late to secure the important position. The Turks retired, and the distant sound of the firing announced to Vienna the first tidings of deliverance. It was not till the evening of the 11th, however, that the main body of the army had reached the ridge. Even then many had lagged behind; the paths were nearly impracticable for artillery, and the Germans abandoned many of their guns in despair between Tuln and the Kahlenberg. But few pieces indeed were fired after the first beginning of the battle on the following day, Polish guns, for the most part, brought up by the vigour of the Grand Marshal of the Artillery, Kouski, the same officer who had directed the Polish field-pieces against the Turkish camp at Choczim.
"An hour before sunset," September 11, as Sobieski and the generals stood at length upon the crest of the hill, "they saw outspread before them one of the most magnificent yet terrible displays of human power which man has seen. There lay the valley and the islands of the Danube, covered with an encampment, the sumptuousness of which seemed better suited for an excursion of pleasure than for the hardships of war. Within it stood an innumerable multitude of animals—horses, camels, and oxen. Two hundred thousand fighting men moved in order here and there, while along the foot of the hills below swarms of Tartars roamed at will. A frightful cannonade was raging vigorously from the one side, in feeble reply from the other. Beneath the canopy of smoke lay a great city, visible only by her spires and her pinnacles, which pierced the overwhelming cloud and flame."[16] Sobieski estimated the force before him at one hundred thousand tents and three hundred thousand men. Including the non-combatants, he was, perhaps, not far wrong; but the fighting men in the Turkish army by this time would be by many fewer than that number. One hundred and sixty-eight thousand men is the most which may be allowed from the muster-rolls found in the Vizier's tent, and that certainly exceeds the truth.[17] All around, except where in the encampment the magnificence of the invader was proudly flaunted in the face of the ruin that he had made, the prospect was desolated by war. Whatever might be the fortune of the coming day, a generation at least must elapse before those suburbs are rebuilt, those villages restored and repeopled, those fields fully cultivated again. The army felt that it lay with them, under God, to provide against that further extension of the ravage which would follow, should the bulwark of the Oesterreich, the Eastern March of the Empire, be forced by Hun and Tartar.
Not distinguishable from the distance at which they stood, thousands of Christian captives lay in the encampment below. The morrow might deliver up the people of Vienna to a like fate with theirs. The city, as the king declared on entering it after the relief, could not have held out five days. As the wind now lifted the cloud of smoke, where should have been the fortifications, the eye could discern nothing but a circle of shapeless ruin, reaching from the Scottish gate to what had been the Burg bastion. Up to and on to it climbed the curving lines of the Turkish approaches.