Buda-Pest.
The Battle of Pressburg had ended in failure, and Henryk Dembiński had been killed. The plan to besiege the Imperial Territory had fallen apart, and János Damjanich was missing.
The campaign in Croatia had failed, with all thirty thousand invading troops wiped out. The campaign in Vojvodina had also failed; they had been unable to rendezvous with the Ottoman army in Belgrade.
The French had withdrawn from the war, the Italians had withdrawn from the war, the British Mediterranean Fleet had been annihilated, Russia had declared war on the Ottoman Empire, the German Federation plan had collapsed, and the Frankfurt National Assembly had been wiped out.
One piece of dreadful news after another had reached him, leaving Lajos Kossuth utterly exhausted.
Yet he still had to face a terrifying reality: opposition within the Hungarian government was growing louder, while the nobles had long since drifted away from him.
After all, if they could not gain greater rights, they might as well continue lording it over Hungary. Or perhaps they had never truly intended to go to war in the first place; Kossuth and the nationalists had simply led them astray.
Under such immense pressure, the usual ways of relieving stress no longer worked. Even smoking and drinking in a brothel did nothing to ease it.
Fortunately, one of his aides had brought him the latest British treatment: injecting morphine under the skin.
Wars and disasters had come more thickly than they had in history. Combined with Franz's influence on the medical world, especially the impact of the medical journal Hvergelmir, this had brought hypodermic injections into use ahead of their time.
(Hvergelmir was the place of the magical spring in Norse mythology that could cure anything.)
Historically, the British had been heavily dependent on addictive drugs. But the upper