“He commanded it all he could, but was not obeyed. Geörgei had already sapped his influence, by poisoning the minds of the military leaders against him—that is, the factious who adhered to himself, the old regulars, whom he had set against the new levies and Honveds. ‘Kossuth is not a soldier, only a lawyer,’ said they; and this was sufficient. For all their talk, Kossuth has given more proofs of soldiership and true generalship than Geörgei and his whole clique. He has put an army of two hundred thousand men in the field; armed and equipped it. And he created it absolutely out of nothing! The patriots had only two hundred pounds weight of gunpowder, and scarce such a thing as a gun, when this rising commenced. And the saltpetre was dug out of the mine, and the iron smelted, and the cannon cast. Ay, in three months there was a force in the field such as Napoleon would have been proud of. My dear captain, there is more proof of military genius in this, than in the winning of a dozen battles. It was due to Kossuth alone. Alone he accomplished it all—every detail of it. Louis Kossuth not a general, indeed! In the true sense of the word, there has been none such since Napoleon. Even in this last affair of Ofen, it is now acknowledged, he was right; and that they should have listened to his cry, ‘On to Vienna!’”
“Clearly it has been a sad blunder.”
“Not so clearly, Captain; not so clearly. I wish it were. There is reason to fear it is worse.”
“What mean you, Count?”
“I mean, treason.”
“Ha!”
“The turning back for that useless siege looks confoundedly like it. And this constantly retreating down the right bank of the Theiss, without crossing over and forming a junction with Sandor. Every day the army melting away, becoming reduced by thousands! Sacré! if it be so, we’ve had our long journey for nothing; and poor liberty will soon see her last hopeless struggle on the plains of the Puszta, perhaps her last in all Europe! Ach!”
The Count, as he made this exclamation, drove the spur hard against the ribs of his horse, and broke off into a gallop, as if determined to take part in that struggle, however hopeless.
The younger man, seemingly inspired by the same impulse, rode rapidly after.
Then gallop was kept up until the spire of Vilagos came in sight, shooting up over the groves of olive and acacia embowering the Puszta village.