As far as feats of arms were concerned, the garrison had as yet maintained its own with undaunted resolution and with a success unimpaired by any material discomfiture; but by the middle of August the inevitable consequences of so close an investment of a large town began to show themselves in the shapes of sickness and scarcity. The use of dried and salted meat produced a dysentery, which was often mortal both among the soldiery and the townspeople. Other forms of disease were attributable to the use of beer ill-brewed and hastily consumed, and to the accumulation of impurities in the streets. Among the victims were the Burgomaster Liebenberg, the Bishop’s Vicar of Vienna, the Provost of St. Stephen’s, the Rector of the University, and many other officials and ecclesiastics. The Commandant himself was attacked by the epidemic, but, for the good fortune of Christendom, recovered. The disease yielded at length, a result due in great measure to the exertions of the admirable Kollonitsch, who visited the hospitals daily; and to the sanatory regulations of the authorities, who carried a stricter supervision into the proceedings of the bakers and the brewers, particularly into the brewery which supplied the Burg Hospital. The provisions specially productive of the dysentery, such as herrings, which were much sought after by the soldiers, were confiscated. The sick townspeople were carefully separated from the healthy, and conveyed into temporary hospitals. The sick and wounded of the soldiers were distributed among the convents, and the city provided for their use 500 measures of wine and 4500 ells of linen. Cesspools were dug to supply the place of the ordinary outlets and transport of the filth of the city; the kennels were irrigated, and proper officers appointed under the direction of Kollonitsch to carry these systematic measures into effect, and made responsible for their execution. The Vizier, whose confidence, possibly somewhat abated by the course of military events, had been revived by the reports of the condition of the garrison, is said to have vowed vengeance against the prelate who had thus assumed the noble attitude of the Prophet between the people and the plague; and to have destined his head as a present to the Sultan. He did not foresee from whose shoulders such a peace-offering would ultimately be culled. Coupled with these sanatory regulations, others were put in force to prevent premature exhaustion of the means of subsistence in the city, which fortunately were so ample as only to require good economy to make them sufficient. Twenty hand-mills and five horse-mills were established under regulation of the authorities for the supply of flour. Lists of prices of the principal articles of subsistence are given in the records of the time, which, in themselves, would convey little information to readers not familiar with the measures in use, and with the current prices of the day, but which indicate considerable abundance as still existing at this period of the siege, and which also show that prices were quadrupled before the siege was raised. The price of wine, in particular, appears to have been low even in comparison with the ordinary prices of the time and locality. The great cellars of the city were reported to contain 169,000 eimers, of which 32,000 belonged to the three colleges of the Jesuits, and other ecclesiastical establishments possessed a large portion of the remainder. The stock of the numerous private traders, and the wine-growers of the neighbourhood was not, it would appear, included in this return. The military measures of defence, meanwhile, were carried on, as was well needed, with unabated vigour. The Captain, Elias Kühn, a Silesian gentleman, gained great credit by his services as an engineer. The citizens showed the greatest alacrity. While 1300 of their body were required for daily service at various posts, they furnished, in addition, from thirty to forty waggons for the daily transport of every necessary article to the works, and many of their horses were sacrificed in this service. In contemplation of the last extremity, chains were furnished from the arsenals to be drawn across the streets. The rings for these are still to be seen in the walls in various parts of the city. To watch the motions of the enemy, two Jesuits were constantly stationed on the tower of Saint Stephen provided with telescopes, who furnished written reports of their observations to the Commandant. The latter took up his residence in the outer court of the Burg, in the immediate neighbourhood of the principal point of attack, and on his own punctual and conspicuous performance of his duties, established his claim to exact the same from others, and to punish or rebuke every instance of neglect or failure. A lieutenant in command of the watch at the most dangerous part of the Löbel bastion neglected to prevent the enemy from forming by night a timber defence against sallies. A court-martial sentenced him to death. The Commandant pardoned him on condition that he would conduct a sally with 29 men and destroy the defences so thrown up. He succeeded, but perished in the execution. Two soldiers, who, upon some dispute as to their pay, rose upon and maltreated an officer, were compelled to throw dice for the life of one, and the loser underwent the penalty. A population so numerous could not but comprise some faint hearts. An order was issued that any one who, from cowardice, should absent himself from his appointed duty should be hanged from his own window. A commission was appointed to undertake a search for delinquents through the four quarters of the city. We hear of no executions in consequence, but the menace is said to have produced a considerable and welcome accession of able-bodied defenders to the walls, who were encouraged to their duty by a bounty of three rix-dollars and ample rations of bread and wine. During the entire siege, indeed, the fighting men were liberally provided for, and clergy as well as laity opened their cellars for their refreshment. The besiegers meanwhile pushed forward their works with unwearied activity. It is, however, unaccountable that their leaders, who usually showed so much eagerness to possess themselves of every commanding position in the neighbourhood of a besieged fortress, should have neglected to establish themselves on the adjacent heights of the Kahlenberg. These acclivities presented not only a cover to the motions of an army advancing to raise the siege, but a post of the utmost importance if once occupied, and the assemblage of the army of the Empire at Crems could be no secret to the Turks. The latter nevertheless contented themselves with the useless destruction of the Camalduline Convent and the desecration of the tomb of the Margrave in its chapel, and then abandoned the position without leaving either garrison or corps of observation, an error which was certainly the main cause of the ultimate catastrophe.
For several days the offer had been promulgated of a considerable reward to the man who would brave the adventure of endeavouring to make his way with dispatches to the camp of the Duke of Lorraine, when on the 6th of August a trooper of Count Gotz’s regiment made his appearance in the city, having swum the various arms of the Danube, and bearing a letter well secured in wax. The hearts of the besieged were thus gladdened with the tidings of the assemblage and daily increase of the Christian army, and with the assurance of early relief. The safe arrival of this messenger was announced to the yet distant army by a discharge of rockets. The messenger was less fortunate in his attempt to return. He was taken by the Turks and brought before the Vizier. The dispatch with which he was intrusted being written in cypher, he was closely interrogated as to its contents and as to the condition of the city. He cunningly invented a tale of despair, and described the defenders of the place as depressed in spirits, exhausted in resources, and on the verge of surrender. The invention saved his life. The Vizier proclaimed these tidings through the camp, and caused the cypher dispatch to be shot back into the city attached to an arrow, with an appendix to the purport that it was needless to write in cypher, for the wretched condition of those who had sent it was well known to the world, and was but the just punishment of men who had awakened the wrath of the Sultan. Soon after this transaction Christopher von Kunitz, a servant of Caprara, who had been detained in the Turkish camp, found means to escape into the city. He brought an account that the Vizier fully expected to have Vienna in his power within a few days, and that many of the Magnates of Hungary, considering the cause of Austria as desperate, had come into the camp to do homage to the Vizier. He gave also a dismal confirmation of the ravage of the surrounding country, of which the Viennese had partial evidence in their own observation. On the 9th of August, Michael Gregorowitz, a Greek by birth, once a Lieutenant in the Heister regiment, leaving the city in a Turkish disguise, crossed the Danube with dispatches for the Duke of Lorraine. A fire signal from the crest of the Bisamberg conveyed the intelligence of the safe accomplishment of his enterprise, and he was rewarded with promotion to the rank of Captain. He did not, however, succeed in effecting his return. The condition of affairs in the city began to be serious: the enemy made daily progress in his approaches, and no more volunteers came forward for the dangerous task of conveying intelligence to the army of the increasing pressure. At last George Francis Kolschitzki, a partisan officer whose name deserves honourable record for the importance of his services, and the courage and dexterity with which they were executed, stepped forward. A Pole by birth, and previously an interpreter in the service of the Oriental merchants’ company, he had become a citizen of the Leopoldstadt, and had served since the siege began in a free corps. Intimately conversant with the Turkish language and customs, he willingly offered himself for the dangerous office of passing through the very camp of the Turks to convey intelligence to the Imperial army. On the 13th of August, accompanied by a servant of similar qualifications, he was let out through a sally-port in the Rothenthurm, and escorted by an aide-de-camp of the Commandant as far as the palisades. He had scarcely advanced a hundred yards, when he became aware of a considerable body of horse which advanced at a rapid pace towards the place of his exit. Being as yet too near the city to escape suspicion, he hastily turned to the left and concealed himself in the cellar of a ruined house of the suburb near Altlerchenfeld, where he kept close till the tramp of the passing cavalry had died away. He then pursued his course, and, singing a Turkish song, traversed at an idle pace and with an unembarrassed air the streets of Turkish tents. His cheerful mien and his familiar strain took the fancy of an Aga, who invited him into his tent, treated him with coffee, listened to more songs and to his tale of having followed the army as a volunteer, and cautioned him against wandering too far and falling into Christian hands. Kolschitzki thanked him for the advice, passed on in safety through the camp to beyond its verge, and then as unconcernedly made for the Kahlenberg and the Danube. Upon one of its islands he saw a body of people, who, misled by his Turkish attire, fired upon him and his companion. These were some inhabitants of Nussdorf, headed by the bailiff of that place, who had made this island their temporary refuge and home. Kolschitzki explained to them in German the circumstances of his mission, and entreated them to afford him an immediate passage over the river. This being obtained, he reached without further difficulty the bivouac of the Imperial army, then on its march between Angern and Stillfried. After delivering and receiving dispatches, the adventurous pair set out on their return, and after some hairbreadth escapes from the Turkish sentries, passed the palisades and re-entered the city by the Scottish gate, bearing a letter from the Duke to the following purport:—“He had received with deep emotion the intelligence of the loss of so many brave officers and soldiers, and of the sad condition of the city consequent both on this loss in action and on the epidemic. He retained his hopes that the defenders of a place so important would never relax in their noble efforts for its preservation. A considerable army was already collected for its relief. Reinforcements were daily arriving from Bavaria, Franconia, and Saxony, and the Duke was only waiting the arrival of the numerous forces of Poland, commanded by their king in person, which was to be expected by the end of August at the latest, to put the united mass in motion for the raising of the siege.” As an appendix to these assurances was added the consolatory intelligence of the surrender of Presburgh to the Imperialists, and of the defeat of Tekeli in two actions. The safe return of the bearer of this dispatch was announced as usual by rockets as night signals, and in the day by a column of smoke from St. Stephen’s spire. On the 21st August the daring Kolschitzki was on the point of repeating his adventurous undertaking, when a deserter, who had been recaptured, and was standing under the gallows with the halter adjusted, confessed that he had furnished to the Turks an accurate description of Kolschitzki’s person. He was himself deterred by this warning, but his gallant companion, George Michailowich, found means twice to repeat the exploit, with the same safety and success as in the first instance. On his second return he displayed a remarkable presence of mind and vigour of arm. Having all but reached the palisades, he was joined by a Turkish horseman, who entered into familiar conversation with him. As it was, however, impossible for him to follow further his path towards the city, in such company, by a sudden blow he struck his unwelcome companion’s head from his shoulders, and springing on the riderless horse, made his way to the gate. He did not, however, after this success, tempt his fortune again. He brought on this occasion an autograph letter from the Emperor, full of compliments and promises, which was publicly read in the Rathhaus.[11] In contrast to so many examples of patriotism and self-exposure, there were not wanting instances of treason. A youth of sixteen, who had twice ventured into the Turkish camp and brought back intelligence which proved to be unfounded, was arrested and put to the question. He had been apprentice to a distiller, or vender of strong liquors (in the vulgar tongue of Vienna, called a water-burner). In his confession, extorted by torture, he stated that the severity of his master had driven him from his employment, and, having no other refuge, he had found means to escape to the camp. Promises of reward had induced him to undertake to procure for the Turks accurate information of the weak points of the defences, the strength of the garrison, the state of its supplies, &c. He at the same time accused a man of the cavalry stables as having instigated him to these courses. Being, however, confronted with this man, he totally failed in maintaining the charge. He was executed with the sword. The audacity of a younger traitor, a boy ten years of age, was still more extraordinary. He was arrested on the 10th August, while entering the city at a slow pace. When questioned as to the cause of his having ventured into the Turkish camp, he alleged that his parents, having been inhabitants of the suburb, had been detained by the Turks; that his father was compelled to work in the trenches, and his mother to sew sand-bags for the sappers. While they were conducting him for his subsistence and safe custody to the Burger Hospital, the unfortunate urchin was met by his mother, who flew at him with reproaches for his long absence, and from her it was soon ascertained that she had never been in the Turkish camp, and that the boy’s father was dead. After this unlucky meeting the boy, taken before the authorities, confessed that he had carried to the enemy intelligence that several guns on the defences had been rendered unserviceable; that the wheaten loaves were no longer so white nor so heavy as they had been, that the commissariat bread was become black and scarcely eatable; that many soldiers had died of such victual, and that the garrison had lost all courage for fighting. After endeavouring, with cunning beyond his years, but in vain, to fix on others the guilt of having instigated his treason, this precocious criminal, for whom whipping would have answered every legitimate purpose of punishment, was beheaded. Two soldiers, taken in the act of deserting, suffered with him. The practice of straying beyond the lines for the real, or alleged, purpose of seeking for plunder, in the ruins of the suburb, had become frequent, and it was thought necessary to check proceedings so favourable to desertion and treason by this example, and by severe edicts.
CHAPTER XII.
23rd August to 8th September.
On the 23rd of August, the enemy, after repeated assaults, had all but gained possession of the Burg ravelin, and had set on fire the palisades in face of the portion of that work still held by the garrison. This the soldiers, carrying water to it in their steel caps, succeeded in extinguishing, and the further advance of the Turks was checked. An assault ensued, in which the combatants mingled hand to hand. The Ottoman sabre, as on other similar occasions, failed in close conflict with the ponderous weapons wielded by the German arm—the halberd, the scythe,[12] the morning star, and the battle-axe, aided by the pitch and water cauldron; and the Turks retired with a loss of 200 men. In various of the adjacent open spaces of the city great fires were kept up to supply the last-mentioned ingredients, which were cooked in huge cauldrons, and transported in smaller vessels, principally by women and children, to the walls. Many Turks were greeted with the contents as they mounted the breach, and finished by a second application as they lay scalded and blinded in the ditch below. Six hundred and sixty-nine cwt. of pitch were used during the siege; but a large part of this was doubtless applied for the purpose of lighting up the ditch, and discovering the nightly operations of the Turkish sappers immediately below the rampart. On this day the Turks were seen from the walls to transport a considerable force of cavalry to the left bank of the Danube, the men in boats, the horses swimming beside them. This strong detachment was sent to reinforce the Pacha of Peterwaradin, who had crossed the river near Presburg to attack the Duke of Lorraine, who was keeping the field near the Bisamberg with his cavalry. Few of this united Turkish force returned to tell the tale of the thorough defeat they received at the hands of Lorraine, who drove them into the Danube with a loss of twenty-five standards. A Polish contingent, under Prince Lubomirski, assisted at this victory, and much distinguished itself. Its services on this occasion were the first fruits of the Polish alliance. Lubomirski’s junction with the Imperialists was an independent movement, and in the first instance excited some jealousy in the mind of Sobieski. Aug. 25, a gallant sally took place for the purpose of checking the operations of the Turkish miners against the Löbel bastion, and driving them from the ditch. The young Duke of Wirtemberg, who was overlooking this operation from the wall, seeing his troops hard pressed, in spite of all remonstrance, descended at the head of a reinforcement in person to the fray, and drove the Turks as far as their first battery. With equal courage he conducted the retreat. The sally was brilliant and successful, but cost the besieged 200 men and several officers. The Duke himself was wounded in the calf of the leg by an arrow, and thereby disabled for the rest of the siege. For several successive days the Burg ravelin continued to be the scene of murderous assault and successful resistance, of which it would be tedious to narrate particulars. Both parties, meanwhile, began to feel sensibly the effects of the long endurance of the siege. In the Mahometan ranks, and especially among the Janissaries, a prejudice of the nature of a superstition assigned forty days as the limit to which an operation of this nature could be extended. They considered it, at least, as a prerogative of their body to mutiny against an extension of that period. In the city, on the other hand, the condition of affairs had assumed a gloomy complexion. The casualties of war and disease had materially thinned the ranks of the garrison, and the mine and the battery, especially the former, had made gaps of ruin in the defences which no exertion of the besieged could fully repair, and which it became daily more difficult to maintain against the rush of numbers. Many of their guns had been rendered unserviceable; but the want of skilled artillery officers and men, with whom the city from the first had been ill provided, was still more severely felt. The engineer, Rimpler, had fallen; the colonel Werner, who commanded the ordnance, and who had effected his entrance into the city on the 17th July, lay wounded and disabled; and before the close of the siege, but two regular artillery officers remained fit for service. The outworks from the Burg, almost to the Scottish gate, were nothing but a mass of rubbish. The Löbel bastion in particular, and the adjacent houses in the street of that name, had specially suffered; but still more so the dwelling which still bears the name of the Turks’ House. Scarcity also was making rapid strides; and if the casualties of war diminished the number of consumers, falling as they did principally on the fighting men they also made it impossible to repeat the sallies which in the early part of the siege had sometimes swept into the city the cattle of the Turkish commissariat. The Turks, while their large force enabled them to close hermetically every channel of supply to the city, guarded their own communications with the utmost vigilance. Forage for the live cattle and sheep still in the city had also failed, and the supplies of the public shambles at the Lichtensteg and the Rothenthurm, were as lean and dry as they were dear and scanty. The small store of dried provision which remained was reserved for the soldiery, and the citizens at large were exposed to severe privation. The streets leading to the shambles were crowded with females, who often had to return home with empty baskets. The price of a pound of beef had risen in the proportion of 1 to 9, and sometimes 12. Articles of daily subsistence to families of middle rank had now become the luxuries of the rich. An egg cost half a dollar, pork eight silver groschen the pound; veal and poultry no longer existed. Under these circumstances, cats no longer enjoyed the immunity due, in times of peace and plenty, to their domestic virtues, and the chase of this animal in cellars and over roofs became not merely a pastime of the young and mischievous, but the occupation of serious and hungry men. The Viennese love for a jest is discernible in the appellation of dachshase, or roof hare, bestowed on this new object of the chase.
The perilous condition of the city was announced to its yet distant friends by discharges of rockets through the nights of the 24th, 28th, and 30th. They were answered by fire-signals from the crest of the Bisamberg; but it was not from the left bank of the Danube that succour was to be expected, and no cheering sign yet broke the darkness in the direction of the Kahlenberg. The besieged looked forward with deep anxiety to the 29th August, the anniversary of the decapitation of St. John, one held peculiarly sacred and fortunate by the Turks. In Soliman’s reign it was the day of the fall of Rhodes, of Belgrade, of Pesth, and of that fight of Mohacs of which three centuries have not effaced the recollection. A general assault was reasonably to be expected on this awful anniversary; but it passed over with no other occurrence than the ordinary explosion of some mines, and a cannonade principally directed at St. Stephen’s. The scanty portion of the Burg ravelin yet held by the besieged had now become untenable. Its communication with the curtain behind was all but cut off, and a reluctant order was at length, on the 3rd September, issued to the officer in command to withdraw his men, which was as reluctantly obeyed, the artillery having been previously removed, and the palisades burnt. It had been actively assailed for twenty-nine days, had withstood fifteen main assaults and the explosion of ten powerful mines, and had been the grave of many thousands of the Turks. Its defence, which was closed in the last moment of withdrawal by the death of the officer in command of the day, a Captain Müller, has been considered by military writers as one of the finest on record. The Grand Vizier gave it a name which implied that the arts of hell and magic had been applied to its defence. During the French occupation of 1809, this outwork, worthy of being preserved as a monument, was blown up, and altogether levelled by order of Napoleon. The Turks took immediate advantage of their acquisition to plant on it two guns and two mortars, from which they opened a heavy fire on the main defences. The danger was now become most imminent, and called for the application of every resource, and the exertion of every faculty, to meet it. Every gate except the Stuben, still reserved as a sally-port, was barricaded afresh with masonry and timber; the chains were drawn across the streets, especially those which led to the Löbel; new batteries were erected; and internal defences so accumulated one behind the other, that, at every ten paces, there rose a breastwork thronged with men and bristling with palisades. In the interior even of the city, at the entrance of the Ballplatz, and near the hotel then occupied by the Spanish ambassador (now the Chancery), were bulwarks, strengthened with beams, and fenced by ditches; and orders were issued to break away the iron gratings of the windows, in order, if necessary, to apply these also to the defence of the streets. In every cellar of the neighbouring houses were placed vessels of water, and drums with pease strewn on their parchment, to give warning, by their vibratory motion, of the approach of the Turkish miners. The subterranean warfare was carried on with much effect by the Austrian counterminers, who frequently succeeded in burying or suffocating the Turkish labourers, and carried off many hundredweights of powder from their chambers. The tenacity of the Turks in prosecuting this mode of attack is shown by the loss they experienced: 16,000 of their miners perished during the siege. On one occasion a fourier or quartermaster of the Beck regiment having detected the end of a mine, sprung like Curtius into the abyss, and encountering five Turks, killed three, and drove the other two to flight. The neighbourhood of the Burg bastion was the scene of the principal of these exploits, and under that fortification occurred also the discovery, more interesting to antiquarians than soldiers, of an ancient stair of sixty-six steps. As the excavations in this quarter soon descended into water, the operations of the enemy were the less to be dreaded, and the vigilance of the besieged was relaxed, but the cellars near the Burg were nevertheless still garrisoned by night, and it was thought necessary to extend this precaution shortly to other parts of the city. The armed force of the city, both regular and irregular, was now so reduced in numbers by repeated assaults and sallies, that the remnant began to pine for the long promised relief. The Burg ravelin being now in the hands of the enemy, the Burg itself, as well as the Löbel bastion, were hourly threatened with the same fate, the more so that the curtain which connected them was so ruined as scarcely to afford a shelter to the troops which manned it. Almost every house in the city was thronged with invalids; and while the energies of the besieged sunk under such pressure, it was to be expected that the courage and hopes of the assailants would rise in proportion. This was not, however, the case. While through the livelong night whole clusters of rockets were discharged together at frequent intervals as signals of increasing distress and danger, and as invocations for succour, there was trouble also in the camp. On the 24th August a mutinous spirit had displayed itself among the Janissaries. The term of 40 days, to which, for love of the Sultan and the Vizier, they had added three, was expired, and they demanded to be released from further duty in the trenches. The exhortations and prophecies of the Vani Effendi, a popular preacher, had persuaded them to await the famous anniversary of St. John, and the effect of the extensive mines which had been pushed under the works of the citadel. These mines, however, had failed; it became difficult to keep the secret of that failure from the troops, and the day of St. John had passed, as we have seen, without any signal occurrence. The troops, too, under command of the Pacha of Aleppo had even left the trenches, and it required the influence of the Grand Vizier in person to bring them back to their duty by promises and fearful threats. He was driven at this crisis to the temporary expedient of promulgating a report of the sudden death of the Emperor Leopold. The Vizier went so far as to order a general discharge of cannon and musketry throughout the camp, a proceeding which puzzled for a while but did not succeed in alarming the garrison, for the alleged cause of rejoicing did not obtain a moment’s credence in the city. The adoption of such expedients by the Vizier, and his general mode of conducting the military operations at this period, are explained, in the opinion of many, on the theory of his desire to obtain possession of the city by capitulation and not by storm. At a period when the result of a simultaneous attack, from the ruined state of the defences, could no longer have been doubtful, he preferred, it is said, to send his troops against the breach in isolated detachments, unequal to cope with the resistance which the garrison, however weakened, was still able to oppose to them. Having destined the valuables of the imperial residence for his own treasury, he was unwilling to expose them to the indiscriminate plunder of a final assault. He was anxious also to preserve from destruction the city itself as the future seat of government for a dynasty of the West, of which he intended to be himself the founder. Writers contemporary and subsequent have concurred in assigning these motives and this policy to Kara Mustapha, and in looking upon him as a Moslem Wallenstein, prepared, in reliance on the devotion of the army, to brave the displeasure of his sovereign, and possibly to throw off his allegiance. It was only towards the end of the siege and under the prospect of failure that these views underwent alteration, and that he became disposed to force an entrance at any sacrifice. By this time, however, the spirit of his troops was so depressed that, as we learn from Demetrius Kantemir’s history of the Ottoman Empire, they often exclaimed, as if addressing the armies of Lorraine and Sobieski, “O ye unfaithful, if you will not come yourselves, let us see at least the crests of your caps over the hills; for these once seen, the siege will be over and we shall be released.” The demonstration of such a spirit as this left the Vizier no longer a choice as to his measures. Though he was still incredulous as to the junction of the Polish forces, and still more so as to the appearance of their terrible commander in the field, the gathering strength of the Imperialists and their preparations for a forward movement could be no secret even to one so negligent in procuring intelligence from that important quarter, and he determined upon a conclusive effort. On the 4th September an explosion took place towards the eastern end of the Burg bastion, the more violent because of the solidity of that work’s construction: 4000 Turks, directed by the Vizier in person, rushed forward to the assault. From every alarm-post the besieged hastened to the point of attack, and among the foremost was Stahremberg, accompanied by his whole staff, prepared and probably expecting to die in the breach, which to a breadth of more than five fathoms had been opened by the explosion. The rubbish had fallen outwards, filling the ditch and facilitating the advance of the Turks, who, armed with sabre and target, and bearing baskets of earth on their backs, were thronging up the ascent. The shout of Allah was heard nearer and nearer, and some bold hands had already planted the horse-tails on the crest of the rampart, when the fire of the besieged filled the ditch with the bodies of the bravest. The fight raged for two hours, and the Turks once more retired with a loss of 500 men. The garrison, however, could ill spare a loss of 117 men and two captains. The fighting had no sooner ceased than every available material was used to repair the breach. Besides the usual appliances of timber, sand-bags, and ox-hides, mattresses and reed mats were pressed into this service. The heavy wooden wine-presses were broken up and the rafters taken from the roofs for the same purpose, and ramparts of planks, in engineering phraseology mantelets, fitted with wheels, were prepared and brought down to the scene of danger. The other portions of the defences were intersected with fresh traverses, and armed with additional guns. A corps 400 strong was raised from parties who had been hitherto exempted from military duty, clerks and artisans in the most indispensable departments of industry. The nightly discharges of rockets from St. Stephen’s were thicker and more frequent than before. The city was in its last agonies. On the 6th, an explosion brought down a length of five fathoms of the wall, 24 feet thick, of the Löbel bastion, making a breach less defensible than that in the Burg bastion, because the parapets of the wall which remained had been previously destroyed. The fury of the assault which followed, and the tenacity of the resistance, may be measured by the Turkish loss of 1500 men. Two standards were at one moment planted on the rampart. A house in the Löbelstrasse opposite the spot where this took place is still called the Turks’ house, and bears a date and a painting of a Turk’s head commemorative of the occurrence. On the evening of this day, five rockets were observed to rise from the Kahlenberg.[13] That short-lived apparition was sufficient to scatter the clouds of despondency which had so long been gathering over the city. The lighthouse which identifies the promontory, or the star which marks the Pole, never sparkled on the eye of the anxious mariner with more of comfort and assurance than that fiery sign conveyed to the watchman on the rampart, or the Jesuit on the spire. It indicated not only that the Imperial army had crossed the river, but that its outposts had crowned the heights and occupied the passes which commanded its only access to the relief of the city, heights and passes which nothing but judicial blindness could have prevented the Turks from occupying in force. Still the salvation of the city hung on a thread. As the imperial army approached, the incentive to attack rose in intensity in the same proportion with the motive to resistance, and it was to be expected that the struggle would be waged to the last with increased energy. Every device of war was exhausted by Stahremberg to provide that no inch of advance should be gained by the enemy unpurchased by streams of his blood. All the ominous preparations for a street fight were redoubled. The houses nearest the breach were converted into batteries; every avenue to it from the interior thronged with soldiers. The city force was mustered at its alarm-posts, waiting for the bell of St. Stephen’s to proclaim the moment of the assault. It never came. The Turks, though they continued to mine under the city, pushing one of their galleries as far as the church of the Minorites, never again showed themselves above ground beyond the mouths of their parallels. On the 8th September there was strange movement in their camp. Camels were loaded, horses were saddled. More rockets rose from the Kahlenberg.