The Unsung Hero: General Görgei [antikvár]

ARTÚR GÖRGEI WAS BORN 200 YEARS AGO He is remembered above all for the surrender that closed the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-1849. As well as being the military commander, he had been invested with dictatorial powers, and instead of entering into battle with the army of Tsar Nicholas I, he ordered his army to lay down their arms. "Our poor luckless homeland is lost. It has fallen not to the strength of the enemy, but to treachery and baseness. That I have had to see this and not been allowed to die: - I raised Gorge! from the dust to seek undying glory for himself and freedom for the homeland. And he has become the cowardly executioner of Hungary." These were the words of Lajos Kossuth, the political leader of the War of Independence and the apostle of Hungarian freedom, written in Vidin, in the territory of the Ottonnan Empire, to where he had fled in early September 1849. He thereby branded the thirty-one-year-old general a traitor and executioner and assigned him sole responsibility for the failure of the War of Independence, an accusation that still echoes today. The Russian military leadership handed over the disarmed army to the Austrians, who embarked on a series of bloody reprisals. The thirteen leaders of the Honvéd army and former prime minister Lajos Batthyány were executed on 6 October 1849. The Austrian commander, Julius Haynau, was determined to physically eliminate the political and military leaders. Whoever did not flee abroad awaited the death sentence or imprisonment, and Honvéd soldiers were drafted into the ranks of the Austrian army and sent to Italy. Emperor Franz Joseph I - who was not recognised as