1848 (48 page)

The horrors of ethnic strife in Transylvania were shared in neighbouring Voivodina and the Banat, where Serb (or ‘Rascian') peasants had risen up against the Magyars and Germans in the summer. In October Leiningen had heard from his brother-in-law, Leopold (‘Poldi') that after the Serbs were routed outside Besce (or Bečej, where the Serb inhabitants of the town joined the insurgents) ‘the fury of the Magyars was terrible. For several hours there was an end of all discipline; and then ensued a horrible butchery. Poldi puts the number of those massacred at 250-300. It is awful to think of! That is what I call a real war of extermination.'
⁹⁶
Later, as the winter began to bite in November, there were constant reminders of the brutalities of the ethnic conflict:

 

Through the winter, village after village taken by the Magyars was torched. It is hard to ascribe the atrocities to official policy, since it appears that on entering the settlements the soldiers acted spontaneously, out of rage and hatred. In a winter campaign lasting from mid-December to late February the Hungarians relentlessly pursued the Serbs. Leiningen himself was willing to justify the burning of villages where, as in Illancsa, the Serbs had allegedly turned on their Magyar neighbours and depopulated the surrounding Hungarian townships, or where the Serbs had proven to be ‘treacherous', as in Jarkovácz, where they welcomed the Magyars before nearly catching them in a death-trap of musketry.
⁹⁸
This was ethnic conflict at its most brutal and squalid.

The Hungarians may have meted out rough justice to the rebellious ethnic minorities, but they were less successful in stopping the main Austrian thrust under Windischgrätz, whose imperial forces invaded in mid-December. Kossuth had tried desperately to bring about an armistice during the winter months through the good offices of the US chargé d'affaires in Vienna, William Stiles. The American met Schwarzenberg on 3 December, but, as Stiles put it, the imperial government was now ‘in the proud consciousness of its inexhaustible strength' and Schwarzenberg confidently rejected the Hungarian proposal. A week later, Kossuth asked Stiles to try his influence on Windischgrätz, but the field marshal gruffly told the American that ‘I cannot treat with those who are in a state of rebellion.' Stiles noted that the new emperor, the young Franz Joseph, who had taken Ferdinand's throne only on 2 December, shared in the fresh bullishness of the Austrian government after the recent victories in Prague and Vienna. But, the diplomat also remarked darkly, those were fought against ‘his own undisciplined and ill-armed subjects'.
⁹⁹
Hungary, he implied, would offer a very different scenario. And so it proved.

The new Hungarian commander was Arthur Görgey, who was only thirty years old, but he had shown Kossuth that he was a fine tactician and strategist at Ozora, where he had played a key role in encircling the Croatian forces, and he had been one of the few commanders to emerge with some credit after the disaster at Schwechat. He came from an impoverished gentry family in northern Hungary, and had embarked on a military career in the imperial army at the age of nineteen. His lack of funds, however, meant that he struggled to live in the manner expected of an officer (in the early years of his career as a lieutenant, his breakfast consisted of a piece of bread and he never ate dinner) and he was refused permission to marry on account of this impoverishment. Frustrated, Görgey resigned his commission and took a degree in chemistry (his great academic interest), but 1848 found him enthusiastically enrolling in one of the new Honvéd battalions, where he received the rank of captain. Even his appearance distinguished him from his whiskered fellow officers: Leiningen, who was one of his admirers, described his ‘oval face, with a high, noble forehead, blue eyes full of deep earnestness - yet sometimes merry and even wicked . . . his moustache and beard are not very thick, and close-cropped, like his hair; his chin is beardless'.
¹⁰⁰

His dizzying rise began in the summer when Batthyány, well aware of Hungary's shortage of munitions, ordered him to buy ammunition from abroad and to learn how percussion caps were made - a skill which, ironically, he duly studied at the imperial fire-works factory in Wiener-Neustadt.
¹⁰¹
By the time Jelačić attacked, he was already a major. Görgey owed his rapid promotion thereafter to his brilliance as a soldier and to his determination. He had proven his utter ruthlessness early in the war, when he had a conservative Hungarian magnate, Count Eugene Zichy, hanged for treason after he was arrested and found to be carrying copies of one of Jelačić's proclamations.
¹⁰²
Görgey also publicly rejected the armistice that Jelačić signed with the Hungarians after his defeat at Pákozd.
¹⁰³
Yet his politics would prove to be problematic for the Hungarians in the long run. He was a moderate constitutionalist who hoped that the conflict would end when the Emperor recognised the April Laws and accepted Hungary back as an autonomous kingdom in the Habsburg Empire. Unlike Kossuth, he placed his faith not in a massive ‘people's war', but in the force of a well-trained, professional army. These differences would lead to a major political conflict between the two men, tainting Görgey's reputation for generations to come.
¹⁰⁴

With only 30,000 men and 80 guns against 52,000 Austrians and their 210 cannon, even Görgey's gritty genius could not stem Windischgrätz's steamrolling advance down the Danube. Görgey slowly pulled his troops back, fighting some delaying actions, but also complaining about civilian interference and lack of supplies and
matériel
. The troops were in a pitiful state: in the retreat from Austria, the army had lost its linen, so the soldiers were covered with lice and, if they wanted to wash their underclothes, ‘they must wear their cloak all day long on their naked bodies',
¹⁰⁵
which was not easy in the bitter winter. Kossuth (who would soon make strenuous efforts to ensure that the army was well supplied) retaliated by suggesting that Görgey was unwilling to stand and fight: a battle was needed if only for the sake of morale. The army's commander was therefore caught in the classic dilemma between military and political imperatives.
¹⁰⁶

Ultimately, Görgey read the military situation well: because Komárom, upstream from Budapest, was holding out against the Austrians, he calculated that, when Windischgrätz reached the Hungarian capital, he would be mindful of his supply lines and so would be reluctant to advance much further. Görgey could therefore pull back and marshal his forces for the counter-attack. He also knew that his command of the army was an important political weapon with which, if his military strategy worked, he could then force his own government to negotiate on the basis of imperial recognition of the April Laws. But his military plans did not satisfy the politicians, who at the end of the month sent General Perczel (the victor at Ozora) forward with a small force to engage Windischgrätz in battle. Perczel's army of six thousand was annihilated. With Budapest now open (since Görgey was determined to retreat deeper into Hungary), on 31 December Kossuth prevailed on both the National Defence Committee and the National Assembly (where a large peace party had emerged) to move to Debrecen, deep in eastern Hungary. A delegation led by Batthyány was also sent to Windischgrätz to discuss terms on 3 January, but the field marshal insisted on nothing less than unconditional surrender. Batthyány was allowed to return to his palace in Budapest, but when it fell to the Austrians two days later, he was arrested on Windischgrätz's orders. By then, Kossuth, the National Defence Committee, the parliament and the contents of the State Treasury had left the capital. The new railway worked poorly in the freezing weather, so those who were able continued the journey on foot, while others scrambled into peasant carts and bumped along the road to Debrecen, 140 miles to the east.
¹⁰⁷
It was there - in a small provincial backwater with no street-lighting, pavements or sewers, where cattle roamed the streets - that the political leadership of liberal Hungary would cling on.

While the Habsburgs and their allies were turning the screws on Hungary, they were also trying to reduce the stubborn pocket of northern Italian resistance: Venice. In February 1849 Schwarzenberg would write that ‘as long as the revolutionary government in Venice still stands as a living symbol of the subversive spirit which arouses Italy, . . . ideas of order will not be able to triumph in the rest of the peninsula'.
¹⁰⁸
The city still had a lot of fight left in it, having been far from hermetically sealed by the Austrian naval blockade, because the Austrian fleet, based at Pula and Trieste, had few seaworthy ships and the loyalty of its largely Italian crews was doubtful. Moreover, the tides, sandbanks and channels in the lagoon required intimate local knowledge, which of course aided the Venetians. The Austrians could therefore mount only a loose guard on the entrances to the lagoon. The weakness of the Austrian naval presence, however, encouraged the Venetian naval command to do little to strengthen the city's existing fleet by arming more ships (the Austrians had spirited their own vessels away to Trieste at the outbreak of the revolution). The Venetian naval forces were bolstered by the return of the Piedmontese fleet, which Charles Albert, after withdrawing it as part of the armistice, now ordered back to the lagoon because he had been angered at the imperfect way in which the Austrians were honouring the ceasefire. Yet there were obvious dangers in relying on others to guard the lagoon, and the government's apparent lack of vigour gave the Mazzinian opposition in the Italian Club the grounds on which to launch its strident verbal attacks on Manin and his colleagues.

Facing inland, the Venetians were better prepared. By October, the Austrians had 21,000 troops on paper, but in reality a third of them were sick from malaria. Meanwhile, the Venetians still held both ends of the railway bridge, with the
terra firma
side protected by the Marghera fort. Pepe's Neapolitan soldiers worked as a hard professional core, training the mostly Venetian recruits, supervising the artillery and the construction of new defences. The government had been assiduous in stockpiling provisions and there was no lack of munitions, since the city controlled the arsenal. Finance was trickier: the troops and the arsenal workers had to be paid, and over the summer the governing triumvirate had imposed forced loans and collected jewellery as a stop-gap. To survive the siege, more funds were needed, so the government had to impose fresh taxation on tobacco and beer - the former, of course, merely replacing the hated Austrian levy that had been one of the sparks of the revolution in the first place. Shares in the Milan-Venice railway were sold off and a new loan was raised on the security of Venice's artworks and historic buildings (fortunately for the future, after the war its wealthiest citizens paid off the debt, so the treasures were saved for the city). In July, a savings bank had been established, issuing Venice's own currency - ‘patriotic' money. The clergy, inspired still by Fathers Gavazzi and Ugo Bassi, steeled the Venetian will to resist and appealed for donations. Pepe donated his salary to the beleaguered state.

He also gave the Venetians a remarkable, though short-lived, victory. On 27 October, a three-thousand-strong Italian force, personally led by Pepe and Giovanni Cavedalis (one of Manin's fellow triumvirs) sortied from the Marghera fort. Emerging from a thick early morning fog, they bayoneted the Austrian gunners who guarded the road, before surprising and overwhelming the defenders of Mestre. Although the hand-to-hand fighting was bitter - casualties on both sides may have reached a staggering 444 dead and wounded (and Bassi risked his life to give spiritual comfort to the fallen) - the Italians prevailed, taking 500 Austrian prisoners. They could not hold on to the town, but it was clearer than ever to the Austrian commander, Marshal Welden, that reducing the city's formidable defensive system of fifty-four forts and octagonal gun batteries would be no easy task.
¹⁰⁹

In the autumn of 1848, however, Venice could not depend militarily on any other Italian state: the Austrian-Piedmontese armistice was (just) holding, while the Papal States and Naples had withdrawn from the conflict. Its salvation lay in foreign intervention, either diplomatic or military. When war broke out between Hungary and Austria in October, the Venetians saluted the Magyars as allies, but the latter were struggling for their own survival. Pragmatically, Daniele Manin had set his hopes on a French invasion and on British mediation to secure the city's independence. Shortly after he had taken power in August, he had sent Nicolò Tommaseo to secure France's help, addressing a letter to the French foreign minister, Jules Bastide, poetically declaring that ‘the life of a people who have contributed not a little to European civilisation now depends on the immediate assistance of the heroic French nation'.
¹¹⁰
The French had already come close to intervening after the disaster at Custozza, since they were truly alarmed by the prospect of the Austrians overrunning Piedmont, which would have brought Radetzky right up to the French frontier. Yet the French government also knew full well that the outbreak of war would give a shot of adrenaline to the French radicals, who were still cowed by the brutal repression of the June days. So in July Bastide had sought to end the war in Italy by proposing Franco-British mediation on the basis of Piedmont annexing Lombardy, while Venetia would stay under Austrian rule, albeit with some autonomy. This was scarcely a solution that would have been acceptable to Manin or Tommaseo. In any case the Austrian government now felt strong enough to resist any diplomatic pressure to negotiate and was prepared to drive for outright victory in Italy. This rejection of Franco-British mediation provoked a cabinet crisis in Paris, with half of the ministers now supporting armed intervention and the other half favouring peace. General Cavaignac was left with the casting vote, and in the end he chose peace. Manin's hope for salvation from the French had therefore been dashed by a single vote in Paris.
¹¹¹