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, thehorses 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 theirguns 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 ofdachshase, or roof hare, bestowed on this new object of the chase.
The perilous condition of the city was announced to its yetdistant 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 onebehind 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 117men 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 onlyaccess 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.