In 1848, Hungary established many new armed forces, including the National Guard, the Land Defenders, the New Hungarian Legion, the Hun Legion, the Self-Defense Force, and others.
The force led by Artúr Görgei and Petofi was none other than the famed Land Defenders, renowned in later generations.
As one of Hungary's earliest revolutionaries and Lajos Kossuth's close ally, Petofi theoretically should not have been sent to the very front lines of the war.
But as the Hungarian Revolution unfolded, resistance to reform grew stronger, its shortcomings became more numerous, and tensions mounted by the day.
Petofi's poetry grew ever more cutting, until even the reformists felt he had become too radical.
Petofi's blunt, straightforward nature was ill-suited to political struggles. On top of that, Lajos Kossuth needed a trusted political commissar.
So Petofi became Artúr Görgei's partner. Though he was no soldier, he had a force under his command that was Hungary's toughest: the "March Youth."
In fact, the so-called "March Youth" was an army formed by Young Hungary and workers who supported the revolution. Their convictions were unshakable.
Artúr Görgei was also highly skilled at training troops, so he immediately put aside his contempt for the poet, who was often drunk.
Their mission was to collect the taxes the Transylvanians had been in arrears on for years and recruit soldiers. At first, everything went smoothly. The Szeklers declared their allegiance to Hungary, and the Land Defenders' ranks swelled by thirty thousand in one fell swoop.
But soon, uprisings broke out one after another across the region. The Austrians in Kolozsvár mustered tens of thousands of troops, while the Saxons, Protestants, and Transylvanians each raised their own forces.
Across Transylvania, seven or eight separate factions sprang up, and every one of them targeted the Hungarians, who possessed the most land