The garrison record, with painful exactness, the terrible annals of the siege; what ravelin is deluged with the blood of assailants and of defenders; where mines have blown the counterscarp into the ditch, or shattered the salient angle of a bastion; what new quarter of the city is devastated by the cannonade; what much-prized life is taken; when the bread begins to fail; what false hopes of relief, or what exaggerated tidings of calamity, circulate among the citizens. These details, of overwhelming interest to every man at the moment, and printed indelibly upon his mind, bring to the distant observer but one confused and appalling panorama of suffering and of endurance, of courage and of despair.
The growing anxiety of the city appears in a second despatch of Starhemberg's, dated August 27. He still tells of attacks repulsed, of sorties boldly executed, and of mines discovered and foiled, but he acknowledges the need of succour. "We are losing many men and many officers, more from dysentery than from the enemy's fire, the deaths from that disease alone are sixty daily. We have no more grenades, which were our best defence; our guns are some of them destroyed by the enemy's fire, some of them burst before firing fifty rounds, from the bad material used by the founder; and the enemy, seeing they can hold their lodgments in the ditch with a few men, are massing great numbers on the counterscarp, to have a large force ready there for some extraordinary effort.... We await, therefore, your Highness's arrival with extreme impatience; for my own part not so much from a wish to be relieved as that I may have the honour of respectfully assuring your Highness of my obedience, being, as I am, your Highness's most humble and obedient servant, STARHEMBERG." The courtly bravado of the subscription is in strong contrast with the hurried postscript that follows:--"My miners tell me that they hear the enemy working beneath them under the Burg bastion; they must have run their gallery from the other side of the ditch, and there is no time to be lost." When this despatch was written, both sides believed that the supreme crisis was at hand.
The 29th of August was looked for as the decisive day. On that anniversary Stuhlweissenberg and Belgrade had fallen before the Ottomans.[10] Above all, on that day the strength of Hungary had been smitten, and her king, Louis, had died, before the hosts of the great Solyman, on the disastrous field of "The Destruction of Mohacs"--that battle which first opened Hungary and Austria to the invader.