1848 (57 page)

The Hungarian government also made belated efforts to secure its eastern frontiers by negotiating with Romanian nationalists, who in mid-July agreed to support the Magyars in return for official recognition of Romanian as the local language of government, law and education, as well as the abolition of compulsory peasant labour services. The ‘nationality law' of 28 July extended these concessions to all the kingdom's ethnic groups. It guaranteed to each the freedom to develop their national identity. While Hungarian would be the language of central government, the counties could use whatever tongue was deemed appropriate to local circumstances. The same day, Jews were given equal rights to those of other citizens. The government also tried to prod the peasantry into rising up against the Austrians. On 19 April, a decree protecting peasant property rights had been passed. Whenever land ownership was in dispute between nobles and peasants, the law would give the benefit of the doubt to the latter. This would end one of the sources of tension since the emancipating decrees of a year previously. However, both the peasant and the nationality laws were too little, too late, to save Hungary from the final onslaught. There was to be no far-reaching programme of social reform that might stir the enthusiasm of the mass of the population for the great struggle. Moreover, the laws on nationality offered
less
to the minorities than the Emperor's centralising constitution of March 1849.

Tsar Nicholas I of Russia had his reasons to help the young Franz Joseph in destroying the Hungarian revolution. He suspected the Hungarians of trying to foment revolution in the Danubian principalities and he feared that an independent Hungary would weaken Austria, allowing Prussia to dominate Germany; he was also anxious about the effect that the Hungarian example would have on his perennially rebellious Polish subjects. These fears combined when the Polish commander of the Hungarian forces in Transylvania, Józef Bem, allowed his troops to surge into Bukovina in January 1849, which caused some alarm among Russian officials in neighbouring Poland. In response Nicholas gave Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich, his viceroy in Poland, ‘full powers to cross the frontier and to enter into battle with the insurgents in case Austrian officials request it'. This was before the new Austrian foreign minister, Schwarzenberg, had even made a formal request for Russian help - and for now, with the Hungarians on the ropes, he was reluctant to invite the great bear into Central Europe. He wanted to prove that Austria ‘is strong enough to quiet its own domestic tremors'.
⁶⁰
In fact, the Russians made a brief foray into Transylvania, responding not to a formal request from Vienna but to a local plea from General Puchner for help against the Magyars. The small, six-thousand-strong Russian army was among the imperial and Romanian forces that were driven back by Bem in the spring, and it caused some embarrassment to Vienna, though not to the Russians, who remained unrepentant about acting in the name of ‘humanity' against the depredations of Hungarian revolutionaries.

Nevertheless, it was a humiliating reverse for the Russians, and the Tsar was still smarting from it when Görgey drove Windischgrätz almost entirely out of Hungary in April. So Nicholas was receptive when Schwarzenberg swallowed his Austrian pride and allowed the Austrian ambassador in Saint Petersburg to make a formal plea for Russian assistance. Nicholas readily assented: while he privately admitted to Paskevich that he had ‘no burning desire' to get entangled in Hungary, he also saw ‘in Bem and in the other rascals in Hungary not only the enemies of Austria but also the enemies of order and tranquillity in the entire world, the personification of villains, scoundrels and destroyers, whom we must destroy for the sake of our own tranquillity'.
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So when Franz Joseph made his appeal to Nicholas in person on 21 May to join the Habsburgs in saving ‘modern society from certain ruin' and to share in the glory of maintaining ‘the holy struggle of the social order against anarchy', he was pushing on an open door.
⁶²
The young Habsburg Emperor had travelled to Warsaw to meet the Tsar, who was gratified to have the Austrian fall on his knees and kiss his hand.

The Hungarians could field at most 170,000 men, supported by 500 guns. Against them the Austrians and the Russians mustered a crushing numerical superiority, with a combined total of 375,000 men, divided between, in the west, Haynau's force of 83,000, backed by 330 artillery pieces; in the south, the 44,000 men under Jelačić, with 190 cannon; and some 48,000 Romanian guerrillas and imperial troops holding out in Transylvania. The rest of the allied numbers comprised the Russians under Paskevich. The latter was a veteran of the wars of expansion in the Caucasus and a hero (if one can really call him that) in the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1831. He fielded an overwhelming force of 200,000, with an awe-inspiring 600 guns, poised in the Romanian principalities and in Poland, but he was not prepared to be bounced by Austrian impatience into a premature assault. Although the Russians had promised to invade by 17 June, Paskevich waited until he was satisfied that his troops were ready and that he had stockpiled enough supplies and equipment to sustain his army. So it was that the belligerent Haynau struck first, driving into western Hungary towards Budapest, wisely bypassing Komárom. Meanwhile, the war in the south remained a horribly squalid affair revolving around ethnic strife.

When the Russians finally attacked in the east, they met with little resistance because the Hungarians were already engaged against the Austrians. Paskevich advanced ponderously into Transylvania, where the sheer weight of Russian numbers tipped the balance in favour of the Romanian and imperial forces. Contrary to what many people expected, the Russians behaved with restraint: Hungarian prisoners were well treated, and there was little or no looting or violence against the local population. Apparently, both the Russian invaders and the Magyars agreed that the real villains were ‘the cowardly and rapacious Austrians'.
⁶³
While the Russians seeped slowly through eastern Hungary, suffering from ghastly bouts of cholera, the Austrians in the west advanced energetically, taking Budapest on 13 July. Görgey withdrew his forces intact to the Tisza - his men exhausted and many of them barefoot - but even his skill and determination could only delay Hungary's final collapse. On 8 July the Hungarian parliament and government once again fled Budapest and reconvened - the National Assembly now numbering two hundred - at Szeged, far to the south, where it was expected that the Hungarian revolution would make its last great stand. Szeged - like Debrecen a town with muddy streets and primitive housing - was the backdrop to the last meeting of the revolutionary Hungarian parliament, for a mere week between 21 and 28 July. It was here that the Magyars made their belated concessions to the Jews and the national minorities. Meanwhile, Görgey, marching southwards with his corps towards Szeged, was negotiating the terms of his own surrender to the Russians, trying to secure the highly unlikely prize of tsarist support for peace on the basis of the April Laws. Kossuth, whom Görgey had the brass neck to keep informed about his freelancing diplomacy, was especially infuriated. In any case Paskevich would accept no terms other than unconditional surrender. The Hungarian government and parliament fled again on 30 July, this time to Arad. The day before, the radical poet Sándor Petőfi, serving as General Bem's adjutant, was killed in action by Cossacks during the fighting in Transylvania; his body was never found. Haynau's army had by now penetrated so far into Hungary that it had reached Temesvár, where on 9 August a murderous exchange of artillery fire terrified the soldiers of the Honvéd units, many of whom were then crushed under the hooves of the Austrian heavy cavalry as they fled.

When Kossuth heard of this final disaster on 11 August, he resigned and unceremoniously handed over full civil and military powers to Görgey. Shaving off his distinctive moustache, beard and leonine sideburns, he took two false passports and fled into exile, travelling first to Constantinople. He was followed by Szemere, who spirited off the crown of Saint Stephen, which he buried at Orsova, on the frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Also on 11 August, a mere twelve members of the National Assembly met at Arad and dissolved the parliament, while Görgey made arrangements for the surrender of his forces to the Russians, in order to keep his officers from the vengeful clutches of the Austrians. The capitulation was carried out in a ceremony at the village of Világos, near Arad, two days later, but the last Hungarian resistance, in the fortress of Komárom, was not snuffed out until 2 October. In all both sides had lost fifty thousand dead. On the Austro-Russian side, most of the casualties were sustained by the Austrians. The Russians, meanwhile, suffered much more from disease than on the battlefield: they lost 550 killed in action but over 11,000 to cholera.
⁶⁴

The Russians (and Nicholas himself) admired the courage of their Hungarian adversaries and pressed for a full amnesty, but the Vienna government on 20 August granted this only to the rank and file, the junior officers - who were conscripted into the imperial army - and Görgey. The rest faced the summary judgement of a military tribunal. Up to the end of 1850, over 4,600 Hungarians were tried and some 500 were sentenced to death, with 120 of these judgements being carried out. Some 1,500 people were imprisoned for long periods - usually the sentence ranged between ten and twenty years - many weighed down by chains. Kossuth, Szemere and other exiles were tried
in absentia
, found guilty and symbolically ‘hanged' by having their names nailed to the gallows in the military prison in Budapest. The most notorious executions were those of fourteen Hungarian commanders at Arad early in the morning of 6 October, and that of Batthyány in Budapest on the same day. Among those shot or hanged at Arad was Leiningen, who managed to write one last moving letter to his beloved wife, Lizzie, before he faced the hangman. When he reached the gibbet, he joked with a guard, ‘They ought at least to have treated us to a breakfast.' The sentences were carried out individually, so the whole ceremony of death lasted three agonising hours, until the bodies dangled lifelessly from a line of gibbets or slumped from their poles.
⁶⁵
Batthyány had been hauled before a court martial at Olmütz in August and, by Schwarzenberg's personal command, was to be hanged. Transferred to Budapest, though, he had slit his own throat with a dagger smuggled into the prison by his wife. Although he survived, the wound ensured that he could not be killed by the noose. Instead, he was shot by firing squad at sunset on 6 October, having refused a blindfold and insisting on giving the order to fire himself.
⁶⁶

Why the ‘War of Independence' (as it is remembered in Hungary) should have failed is a subject of some controversy. For Istvan Deak, ethnic strife was the key, particularly the Magyar-Romanian conflict in Transylvania, since that, he argues, was an entirely avoidable war: with timely concessions by the Hungarians, the Romanians might have been quiescent at precisely the time when the government was confronting Jelačić's invasion from the south and then the Austrian assault from the west. Yet, as Alan Sked points out, the Hungarians saw off the Croatian challenge and, after the initial shock in Transylvania, they soon mastered the situation there, too. Sked and Deak appear to agree when they dismiss the importance of Russian intervention. Paskevich's gargantuan army moved slowly across eastern Hungary, undertaking no great decisive battles against the Hungarians. Had the war dragged on for longer than it did, then Russian numbers certainly would have told; but as it was, the Hungarians were defeated repeatedly and decisively by the Austrians in the summer of 1849. Ultimately, therefore, the Hungarians lost because the Austrians themselves mustered military superiority, particularly in the unglamorous but vital sphere of logistics. The Austrians were better supplied, better equipped and better trained than the hastily assembled Hungarian Honvéd battalions. The improvised Hungarian armaments industry may have turned out an impressive number of firearms each day, but they were not reliable: in battle, muskets misfired every fourth shot and a shortage of weaponry meant that attacks could not always be followed up rigorously. Austria, meanwhile, had an overwhelming superiority in manufacturing capacity - including the all-important works in iron and steel. The Hungarians desperately sought to make up for their shortage of munitions (Görgey himself had been put to work on this task), but they never succeeded in closing the gap. Moreover, since the great Hungarian arms works was in Budapest, a city that was twice captured by the Austrians in 1848-9, production was disrupted as the manufacturing was relocated in Nagyvárad. Furthermore, for much of 1849, it was impossible for Hungary to make up the deficit in arms and munitions through imports because the country was cut off from the outside world.
⁶⁷

While not denying the importance of inherent Austrian military strength (and relative Hungarian weakness), it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the key lies either in the ethnic conflict or in the Russian intervention. There is strong evidence that it was the convergence of these two factors that was decisive in the Habsburg victory. It is true that in 1848 Jelačić was disposed of with relative ease and that General Bem managed to drive back the Romanians, but the very persistence of the southern Slav and Romanian opposition to Magyar nationalism meant that, when the Austrian counter-attack came, the Hungarian forces could not focus fully on the west to see it off. As it was, Görgey faced the 83,000-strong Austrian force with just 63,000 men at a time when the Hungarian armed forces in total numbered 170,000. The rest had to remain in the interior, deployed against Croats, Serbs, or Romanians. They were also preparing to meet the Russians. Consequently, even though the Russian blow did not fall like the skull-crushing hammer one might have expected, the
potential
dangers prevented the Hungarians from concentrating their forces until the liberal regime's last stand. Görgey's numerical inferiority against the Austrians may not have been enormous, but if different circumstances had allowed a commander of his mettle to field equal or greater numbers, then the balance might have been tipped in Hungary's favour.