With the Duke of Banyat's sudden death leaving the nobles without a leader, Kossuth suddenly put forward a new conscription bill and plans for another offensive against the Imperial Territory.
This time, command would go to Major General János Damjanich, one of the three leading figures in the Hungarian military in history.
János Damjanich came from the lower nobility. Despite his many military achievements, he could only take the lowest seat, so he was naturally much closer to Kossuth, who might change the course of his life.
In his postwar memoirs, János Damjanich wrote that war was nothing more than a stepping stone to promotion. Who was right or wrong, whether a cause was just or not—none of it really mattered.
But János Damjanich was far luckier than his colleague Artúr Görgei. Kossuth called the former a hero, while the latter was branded a traitor.
Later, János Damjanich not only escaped the purge, but was also pardoned by the Austrian Empire after two years in prison. He went on to become a field marshal, and spent the rest of his life in honor and luxury, living to the ripe old age of eighty-three.
This old fellow even became a Romanian hero for a time, because he had planned the massacre of the Saxons—a branch of the Germans—in Transylvania.
But a hundred years later, Romanians discovered that this hero had not only planned the massacre of the local Saxons; he had also spared neither the Wallachians nor the Moldavians. They promptly kicked him out of their textbooks.
Some later generations claimed that János Damjanich possessed a modern spirit, but Franz, a modern man himself, didn't see it that way.
Still, having János Damjanich in command of Hungary's offensive against the Imperial Territory wasn't a bad thing. After all, as long as