Chapter 76: Grasping at Remedies in Desperation
"War must serve politics"—this was the best excuse Franz could come up with. He couldn't exactly say he was worried history would repeat itself, that the Hungarians might suddenly erupt in force and drive the Bohemian Legion back, could he?
No one would believe that even if he said it. The Bohemian Legion had an army of a hundred thousand men. Even at half strength, that was still fifty thousand regular troops. How many Hungarian troops did Budapest have now?
The Hungarian Republic had quite a few troops in name, but the forces Kossuth could actually mobilize were extremely limited. Every level of local government had National Guard units, many of which existed only on paper.
The Kossuth government had gathered some routed soldiers from the front, bringing Budapest's nominal total strength to eighty thousand. With one rifle shared between two or three men on average, and troops whose morale had utterly collapsed, how much fighting strength could they possibly have?
Prince Windisch-Grätz was not only a soldier, but also a politician. Naturally, he did not refute the statement.
"Your Highness, could it be that the government has some plan?"
Franz smiled. "Prince, have you perhaps forgotten the Italian front?"
Prince Windisch-Grätz nodded. Though he did not consider the Kingdom of Sardinia much of a threat, he would not refuse an easier victory.
With Austria's main forces all deployed, the Hungarian Republic was on the brink of collapse. If the Kingdom of Sardinia still did not attack Venice, then in the future it would face not a hundred thousand Austrian troops, but perhaps two hundred thousand—or three hundred thousand.
There could not be any more than that. Suppressing the Hungarian rebellion was a war on home soil. The Habsburg Family had not made