"This is Hungarian land! You're the ones who should be damned!" Chutkalai cursed.
A bullet answered him, but it didn't hit Chutkalai himself. It struck the horse beneath him.
Chutkalai tumbled from his horse in a panic, his bluster gone, but he still glared imperiously at Itamar.
The latter naturally knew what to do. He was angry too, but not because the Germans had shot at the Hungarians. He was furious that serfs dared defy the army.
Normally, neither serfs nor peasants would ever dare provoke the army.
But the people living on the Imperial Manor were different. Many of them had witnessed "Magyar freedom," and their battles with the bandits had never truly ceased over the years.
Countless crude headstones constantly reminded people of the bandits' depredations. Around 1840 had been their most brazen days.
Bands of bandits roamed everywhere, killing and burning. They even dared to murder stewards and advisers of imperial property.
The Hungarian government brushed off these appalling crimes with a single phrase: "It has been so since ancient times."
In the end, only after Archduke Albrecht led imperial troops into the manor did the bandits' arrogance subside.
(These events were mentioned earlier in Volume Four, Chapters Twenty and Twenty-Five, and Volume Five, Chapters 21–28.)
In addition, the Hungarian refugees who had been rescued and settled on the manor continually spoke of the Hungarian government's broken promises, cunning, and cruelty.
(The Hungarian refugee incident of 1836, Volume Four.)
The church's and the royal family's lessons in loyalty had also given most people a basic sense of right and wrong, making them difficult to tempt or sway.
Franz's loyalty education program had been running for over a decade, and it had worked. At the very least, there had been no mass defections.
Besides these measures, Franz had