Among those who distinguished themselves particularly in this service were, General the Honourable James Keith (brother of the exiled Earl Marischal of Scotland), who was dangerously wounded in the thigh, and another Jacobite exile, Colonel Count Brown, a brave Irishman--"A Catholic," says Tooke, "who was compelled to seek his fortune in foreign countries, by the exertion of those talents which he would willingly have dedicated to the service of his _own_."
The garrison, which consisted of 3000 Janissaries and 7000 Bosniacs, stoutly defended themselves; but Oczakow was carried by assault. A bomb set fire to the town, and blew up its magazine; Lacy and Munich seized this opportunity to lead on their stormers, and, pressed by the foe before them and the flames behind, the Mussulmans were nearly all cut to pieces; but not before they had slain 11,000 regular troops and 5000 Cossacks by bayonet and scimitar.
The rapid success of these two generals against the Crim Tartars awakened the restless ambition of Austria; and the Emperor believing that, if he assailed the Porte by the Hungarian frontier while the Czarina pressed her victorious arms along the shores of the Black Sea, the Empire of the Osmanlies would be finally subverted, declared war, and to co-operate with his troops, the Count Brown[11] left Lacy and Munich, and marched into Hungary at the head of a Russian column. But the hopes of the Emperor were frustrated! The Turks turned all their vengeance against him, defeated his generals, and besieged Belgrade. The Austrian Field-Marshal Wallace was defeated at Crotska, and the gallant Earl of Crawford who served under him as a volunteer, received a wound from which he never recovered. The troops of Brown were also routed, and he was taken prisoner. The barbarous Osmanlies stripped him quite naked, and bound him back to back with another prisoner for forty-eight hours. He was four times exposed for sale as a slave in the common market-place, and four times was bought by different masters, who treated him with the greatest cruelty.
He gave out that he was a captain to lessen the price of his ransom, and in this deplorable condition was discovered by an Irish gentleman, who communicated his story to M. de Villeneuve, the French ambassador at Constantinople, by whom he was generously ransomed for three hundred ducats, and sent back to Russia, where he died a general and governor of Riga, in 1789, in his eighty-eighth year.