THE STORY OF THE ZILAHS
Andras Zilah, Transylvanian Count and Prince of the Holy Empire, was one
of those heroes who devote their whole lives to one aim, and, when they
love, love always.
Born for action, for chivalrous and incessant struggle, he had sacrificed
his first youth to battling for his country. "The Hungarian was created
on horseback," says a proverb, and Andras did not belie the saying. In
'48, at the age of fifteen, he was in the saddle, charging the Croatian
hussars, the redcloaks, the terrible darkskinned Ottochan horsemen,
uttering frightful yells, and brandishing their big damascened guns.
It seemed then to young Andras that he was assisting at one of the
combats of the Middle Ages, during one of those revolts against the
Osmanlis, of which he had heard so much when a child.
In the old castle, with towers painted red in the ancient fashion, where
he was born and had grown up, Andras, like all the males of his family
and his country, had been imbued with memories of the old wars. A few
miles from his father's domain rose the Castle of the Isle, which, in the
middle of the sixteenth century, Zringi had defended against the Turks,
displaying lofty courage and unconquerable audacity, and forcing Soliman
the Magnificent to leave thirty thousand soldiers beneath the walls, the
Sultan himself dying before he could subjugate the Hungarian. Often had
Andras's father, casting his son upon a horse, set out, followed by a
train of cavaliers, for Mohacz, where the Mussulmans had once overwhelmed
the soldiers of young King Louis, who died with his own family and every
Hungarian who was able to carry arms. Prince Zilah related to the little
fellow, who listened to him with burning tears of rage, the story of the
days of mourning and the terrible massacres which no Hungarian has ever
forgotten. Then he told him of the great revolts, the patriotic
uprisings, the exploits of Botzkai, Bethlen Gabor, or Rakoczy, whose
proud battle hymn made the blood surge through the veins of the little
prince.
Once at Buda, the father had taken the son to the spot, where, in 1795,
fell the heads of noble Hungarians, accused of republicanism; and he said
to him, as the boy stood with uncovered head:
"This place is called the Field of Blood. Martinowitz was beheaded here
for his faith. Remember, that a man's life belongs to his duty, and not
to his happiness."
And when he returned to the great sombre halls of the castle, whence in
bygone days the Turks had driven out his ancestors, and whence, in their
turn, throwing off the yoke of the conquerors, his ancestors had driven
out the Turks, little Prince Andras found again examples before him in
the giants in semi-oriental costumes, glittering in steel or draped in
purple, who looked down upon him from their frames; smoke-blackened
paintings wherein the eagle eyes and long moustaches of black hussars,
contemporaries of Sobieski, or magnates in furred robes, with aigrettes
in their caps, and curved sabres garnished with precious stones and
enamel, attracted and held spellbound the silent child, while through the
window floated in, sung by some shepherd, or played by wandering Tzigani,
the refrain of the old patriotic ballad 'Czaty Demeter', the origin of
which is lost in the mist of ages
Remember, oh, yes! remember our ancestors! Brave, proud Magyars,
when you left the land of the Scythians, brave ancestors, great
forefathers, you did not suspect that your sons would be slaves!
Remember, oh, yes! remember our ancestors!
Andras did remember them, and he knew by heart their history. He knew
the heroism of Prince Zilah Sandor falling in Mohacz in 1566 beside his
wife Hanska who had followed him, leaving in the cradle her son Janski,
whose grandson, Zilah Janos, in 1867, at the very place where his
ancestor had been struck, sabred the Turks, crying: "Sandor and Hanska,
look down upon me; your blood avenges you!"
There was not one of those men, whose portraits followed the child with
their black eyes, who was not recorded in the history of his country for
some startling deed or noble sacrifice. All had fought for Hungary: the
greater part had died for her. There was a saying that the deathbed of
the Zilahs was a bloody battleground. When he offered his name and his
life to Maria Theresa, one of the Zilah princes had said proudly to the
Empress: "You demand of the Hungarians gold, they bring you steel. The
gold was to nourish your courtiers, the steel will be to save your crown.
Forward!" These terrible ancestors were, besides, like all the magnates
of Hungary, excessively proud of their nobility and their patriarchal
system of feudalism. They knew how to protect their peasants, who were
trained soldiers, how to fight for them, and how to die at their head;
but force seemed to them supreme justice, and they asked nothing but
their sword with which to defend their right. Andras's father, Prince
Sandor, educated by a French tutor who had been driven from Paris by the
Revolution, was the first of all his family to form any perception of a
civilization based upon justice and law, and not upon the almighty power
of the sabre. The liberal education which he had received, Prince Sandor
transmitted to his son. The peasants, who detested the pride of the
Magyars, and the middle classes of the cities, mostly tradesmen who
envied the castles of these magnates, soon became attracted, fascinated,
and enraptured with this transformation in the ancient family of the
Zilahs. No man, not even Georgei, the Spartanlike soldier, nor the
illustrious Kossuth, was more popular in 1849, at the time of the
struggle against Austria, than Prince Sandor Zilah and his son, then a
handsome boy of sixteen, but strong and well built as a youth of twenty.
At this youthful age, Andras Zilah had been one of those magnates, who,
the 'kalpach' on the head, the national 'attila' over the shoulder and
the hand upon the hilt of the sword, had gone to Vienna to plead before
the Emperor the cause of Hungary. They were not listened to, and one
evening, the negotiations proving futile, Count Batthyanyi said to
Jellachich:
"We shall soon meet again upon the Drave!"
"No," responded the Ban of Croatia, "I will go myself to seek you upon
the Danube!"
This was war; and Prince Sandor went, with his son, to fight bravely for
the old kingdom of St. Stephen against the cannon and soldiers of
Jellachich.
All these years of blood and battle were now half forgotten by Prince
Andras; but often Yanski Varhely, his companion of those days of
hardship, the bold soldier who in former times had so often braved the
broadsword of the Bohemian cuirassiers of Auersperg's regiment, would
recall to him the past with a mournful shake of the head, and repeat,
ironically, the bitter refrain of the song of defeat:
Dance, dance, daughters of Hungary!
Tread now the measure so long delayed.
Murdered our sons by the shot or the hangman!
In this land of pleasure, oh! be not dismayed;--
Now is the time, brown daughters of Hungary,
To dance to the measure of true hearts betrayed!
And then, these melancholy words calling up the memory of disaster, all
would revive before Andras Zilah's eyes--the days of mourning and the
days of glory; the exploits of Bem; the victories of Dembiski; the
Austrian flags taken at Goedolloe; the assaults of Buda; the defence of
Comorn; Austria, dejected and defeated, imploring the aid of Russia;
Hungary, beaten by the force of numbers, yet resisting Paskiewich as she
had resisted Haynau, and appealing to Europe and the world in the name of
the eternal law of nations, which the vanquished invoke, but which is
never listened to by the countries where the lion is tearing his prey.
And again, Zilah would remember the heroic fatherland struck down at
Temesvar; the remnants of an armed people in refuge at Arad; and Klapka
still holding out in the island of Comorn at the moment when Georgei had
surrendered. Then, again, the obscure deaths of his comrades; the
agonies in the ditches and in the depths of the woods; the last
despairing cries of a conquered people overwhelmed by numbers:
Dance, dance, daughters of Hungary!
All this bloody past, enveloped as in a crimson cloud, but glorious with
its gleams of hope and its flashes of victory, the Prince would revive
with old Varhely, in the corner of whose eye at intervals a tear would
glisten.
They both saw again the last days of Comorn, with the Danube at the foot
of the walls, and the leaves of the trees whirling in the September wind,
and dispersed like the Hungarians themselves; and the shells falling upon
the ramparts; and the last hours of the siege; and the years of mournful
sadness and exile; their companions decimated, imprisoned, led to the
gallows or the stake; the frightful silence and ruin falling like a
winding-sheet over Hungary; the houses deserted, the fields laid waste,
and the country, fertile yesterday, covered now with those Muscovite
thistles, which were unknown in Hungary before the year of massacre, and
the seeds of which the Cossack horses had imported in their thick manes
and tails.
Beloved Hungary, whose sons, disdaining the universe, used proudly to
boast: "Have we not all that man needs? Banat, which gives us wheat;
Tisza, wine; the mountain, gold and salt. Our country is sufficient for
her children!" And this country, this fruitful country, was now covered
with gibbets and corpses.