The redoubtable Mecsey Sándor, who makes as faithful a steward as a soldier-servant, fairly worships her; and this is the more wonderful, because the honest fellow heartily detests the whole German race.
Mecsey is perfectly happy and comfortable, and spends his leisure time in describing over and over again the stirring events of the great campaign.
Occasionally Arthur Görgei--now a poor man living in retirement--comes to see us, and I need hardly say that no one save "John the Joyous" himself is ever more heartily welcomed.
Some men--but none on my estates--call him a traitor, and assert that he sold our country to the Russians. If Görgei betrayed his country, we of his army were accomplices in his treachery, and this is the proof.
We marched hundreds of miles, often bare-footed, over rough and stony ground; we half froze in the winter's cold, and fainted beneath the scorching heat of summer; for weeks together we lived on a scanty ration of black bread and water; we stormed fortresses and fought terrible battles when the odds were all against us; and the man whose spirit, courage, and leadership made these things possible was Arthur Görgei.
If such deeds as these were acts of treachery, then indeed were we all traitors, and our leader was far and away the greatest.
But the men who spoke thus wildly applauded Louis Kossuth as the most glorious patriot in history, and Kossuth was a fugitive in the land of the Turks!
It is the usual rule that the losers should be called on to pay for the game, and our opponents adhered to it closely.
With the exception of Görgei and Klapka, our chiefs were seized by the Austrians, and, after a mock trial, sentenced to death. Aulich, Damjanics, Nagy Sándor, with ten others, all perished on one day; while at Pesth the high-spirited Batthiany, the true leader of the national party, was shot in the presence of several thousands of his sorrowing countrymen.
Hungary indeed lay crushed under the heel of her Russian and Austrian conquerors, but since that day many events have happened. Our liberties have been restored, and now our country takes its rightful place as the ally and not the vassal of the haughty Hapsburg dominion.