The armies invading Wallachia were entrusted to the care of General Heissler, who consequently wrote to Prince S—— informing him that he was advancing on Bucharest through the Transylvanian Alps with ten thousand men, therefore he was to provide winter quarters and provisions for his army, as he intended to winter there.
At exactly the same time the Tartar Khan gave the Prince to understand that he intended to invade Moldavia in order that he might follow the movements of the Transylvanian army close at hand.
The Prince liked the one proposition as little as the other, so he sent the Tartar Khan's letter to General Heissler bidding him beware, as a great force was coming against him, and he sent Heissler's letter to the Tartar Khan advising him in a friendly sort of way not to move too far as Heissler was now advancing in his rear.
Consequently both armies turned aside from the Principality, and Wallachia had to support neither the Germans nor the Tartars.
This is the diplomacy of little states.
Amidst the wildly romantic hills of Lebanon is a pleasant valley for which Nature herself has a peculiar preference. Amidst the gigantic mountains which encircle a vast hollow on every side of it, rises a roundish mound. On level ground it would be accounted a hill, but in the midst of such a range of snowy giants it emerges only like a tiny heap of earth, and to this day nothing grows on it but the cedar—the finest, darkest, most widely spreading specimens of that noble and fragrant tree are here to be found. A foaming mountain stream gurgles down it on both sides, a little wooden bridge connects the opposing banks, and in the midst of the bridge a rock projecting from the water clings to the mountain side. Far away among the blue forests shine forth the white roofless little houses of the city of Edena, which, built against the mountain side, peer forth like some card-built castle, and still farther away through gaps in the hills the Syrian sea is visible.
Here in former days on the heights stood the romantic and poetical kiosk of Feriz Beg.
The youth, with dogged persistence, continued to live for years in this sublime solitude with the din of battle all around him. The prophecy which he had once pronounced in the Diván was whispered abroad among the people, ran through the army, and as every one of his sayings was severally fulfilled, the more widely there spread in the hearts of the soldiers the superstitious belief that till he seized his sword they would everywhere be defeated, but when he should again appear on the battlefield the fortune of war would turn and become favourable once more to the Ottoman arms.
Long ago the Diván had wished to profit by this blind belief, and countless embassies had been sent to the youthful hermit in his solitude announcing the fall of generals, the loss of battles, the pressure of peril.