Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/422

408 of general Wartesleben on the heights of Meadia, and swept through the banat of Temeswar, Joseph's own territory, which he held, and threatened to invade Hungary. Joseph hastened with forty thousand men to support Wartesleben, leaving general Laudohn to conduct the war in Croatia. The army was delighted to have Laudohn at their head instead of the emperor. He led it on the very day of his arrival against the fortress of Dobitza, which ho took; he then passed the Save, drove the Turks before him, defeated seven thousand of the enemy before Novi, and took that place, where his operations were suspended by the winter. Joseph gained little credit by his junction with Wartesleben. The Turks attacked him, and, though they were for the moment repulsed, the emperor retreated in a dark night, and the Turks and Austriaus resumed their former positions.



After taking Verplanka, the campaign terminated with a three months' truce. But the Austrian army had suffered more severely from the miasmata of the marshes of the Danube and Save than from the Turks. Joseph had been persuaded by his physicians that vinegar would be a much more efficacious resistant of the marsh fever than their usual rations of wine. He had stopped the wine and ordered the vinegar, and the consequence was that the soldiers died off as by a pestilence.

Meantime, the Russians had been occupied with the siege of Oczakoff, near the mouth of the Dnieper. There the Turks had endeavoured to burn their flotillas and flat-bottomed boats, in the shallows, or, as they are called, the liman, at the mouth of the river; but besides Potemkin, they had the able Suvaroff to contend with. This sagacious general drew the Russian flotilla under the forts of Kinburn, nearly opposite to Oczakoff, of which they were in possession. Thus safe himself, he swept the broad liman with his guns, destroyed many of the boats of the Turks, as they got entangled in the sands of the shallows, and compelled the capitan-pasha, who commanded, to withdraw his fleet.

After several vain attempts, Oczakoff was stormed on St. Nicholas-day, the 17th of November. But this success was only obtained at the last moment, in the very desperation of despair, and when the campaign had cost Russia twenty thousand men, of whom five thousand perished in the final assault.

But the czarina, though mistress of Oczakoff, was far from the end of her designs. She contemplated nothing but the subjugation of the Turkish empire. For this purpose she determined to excite insurrection in all the tributary states of that empire. Her agents had excited the Montenegrins to an outbreak; they had prepared the Greeks for the same experiment, and the Mameduke beys in Egypt. She determined to send a powerful fleet into the Mediterranean to co-operate with these insurgents, to seize on the island of Candia, to ravage the coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor, and to force the passage of the Dardanelles, or, if that were not practicable, to blockade them. Thus