"If in the interval you dare to stir, I will extirpate you from the face of the earth; and then, that the seed of the Serbs may be extinct, I, the last of them, will shoot myself."
The success of this first attempt so encouraged the General, that, after much persuasion, he gave a solemn promise to make a speech to his army when next they went into action.
On the eve of the battle, Dámjánics felt his spirits extraordinarily low.
"Strange," thought he to himself, "never yet have I trembled at the approach of a fight, but now I feel as if I had no stomach for it." And he sought within himself the cause of this unaccustomed mood, but all in vain.
Presently, however, one of his staff-officers came to remind him that, before the next day's battle, they expected to hear the speech he had promised them.
"Devil take it!" cried the General. "_That_ was what made me shake in my boots. But never fear, it shall be done--I will venture it--the speech you shall have."
He had drawn out his plan of battle in a quarter of an hour. But morning dawned whilst he was still hammering at his speech.
The troops stood in order of battle. Dámjánics rode along the front of the line. Everybody knew he was to make a speech, and what a cruel task it was to him.
Before the colours of the ninth battalion he halted, raised his hat and spoke:
At that instant the artillery beyond the Theiss boomed out its first discharge. The General's face glowed, he forgot phrases and oration, tore his sabre from the scabbard, pressed his schako down upon his brow, and--
"Yonder is the foe: follow me!" he shouted in a voice of thunder. A tremendous hurrah was his army's reply, as they followed their leader, with the speed and impetuosity of a torrent, to the familiar encounter of the Austrian cannon.
"Why is it," said Dámjánics, as he limped up to the gallows, after seeing seven of his brave comrades executed before his eyes, on the morning of the fatal sixth of October 1849--"why is it that I, who have ever been foremost in the fight, must here be the last?" That was no empty boast in the dying man's mouth. "To Dámjánics," says Schlesinger, "after Görgey, belongs the glory of all the battles from Hatvan to Komorn. From the commencement of the movement, he was the boldest champion of the national cause." And whatever his staff and his Austrian executioners may have argued from his oratorical incapacity and his ignominious death, neither, assuredly, will prevent his name's preservation on posterity's list of patriot-heroes, even though he should never obtain the monument which it has been predicted that Hungary will one day erect to him, upon the spot where he mounted the scaffold.