Outside Pressburg, at the Hungarian Army's camp.
After half a month of standoff, Henryk Dembiński finally realized he had stepped straight into a deep pit.
By then, the Hungarian Army's morale was low. Supplies were scarce, and they lacked siege weapons. None of that was fatal, though. The biggest problem was that their intelligence was wrong.
At least, based on his years of military experience, the defenders of Pressburg were no cowards cowering inside the city, as the National Assembly claimed. They were a fierce beast that had lain in wait for a long time.
On his first day in command, Henryk Dembiński had gone to the front to survey the area himself. He had found it strange that a city besieged for half a year showed no signs of decline. Instead, it still exerted a crushing sense of oppression.
But given the actual command abilities of his comrades, it wasn't hard to understand how things had come to this.
After all, back in Transylvania, there had even been cases of Hungarian regulars being defeated by militias armed with nothing but pitchforks and hunting rifles.
Faced with the same situation, Henryk Dembiński had turned the tide in just three days, driving those bumpkins off with their tails between their legs.
Yet after two probing attacks, Henryk Dembiński concluded that all his predecessors had been lying.
Thousands of lives weren't even enough to fill the trenches. Henryk Dembiński had never seen firepower so fierce. In just two hours, an entire brigade had been mauled.
Austria's losses weren't nonexistent, but they were almost impossible to see.
"What the hell are we even fighting for?"
Henryk Dembiński had wanted to quit on the spot and go home. But the Hungarian National Assembly had not only rejected his resignation, it had also ordered him