On 9 August 1849, at Temesvár in the Banat (today Timișoara in Romania), the main army of the Hungarian revolution was defeated by the Austrian army of General Julius von Haynau. The Polish general Henryk Dembiński had led it there after losing at Szőreg; in the middle of the battle he handed command to another Pole, Józef Bem, summoned from Transylvania. Bem chose to attack, but was injured in a fall from his horse, and the Hungarians retreated. Temesvár was the last great battle of the war: on 13 August Artúr Görgey surrendered to the Russians at Világos.
Two Polish generals
By the summer of 1849 Hungary's revolution was fighting both Austria and the Russian army sent to crush it. Two veterans of the Polish November Uprising served it in high command. Józef Bem had defended Transylvania with a small army since 1848, but on 31 July 1849 the Russians destroyed his force at Segesvár, and he escaped only by pretending to be dead. Henryk Dembiński commanded the main Hungarian army in the south.1
On 5 August Haynau's Austrians beat Dembiński at Szőreg. The plan was to join Görgey's army at Arad, but Dembiński instead fell back toward Temesvár, a fortress the Hungarians had been besieging. According to the Pallas encyclopedia, Kossuth on 6 August ordered him to Arad and summoned Bem from Transylvania to take over the supreme command.2
The battle
Dembiński had already begun the battle at Temesvár on 9 August when Bem reached the field and took over command during the fighting. György Bálás, in his biography of Bem published in 1927, writes that the troops greeted him with loud cheers, that Dembiński wanted to withdraw and that Bem decided instead to attack.3
Bálás describes Bem riding at a gallop from the left wing to the right, where he meant to lead the decisive attack, when his horse fell and he was badly hurt in the shoulder, leaving him unable to command; on hearing of it Dembiński ordered a retreat toward Lugos. The Polish History Museum's calendar records the day as a defeat of the Hungarian army under Bem by Austrian and Russian forces. The Pallas encyclopedia calls it the last great battle of the war of independence.4
Világos and exile
The defeat left Hungary without hope. On 11 August Lajos Kossuth gave up his powers to Görgey, who two days later, on 13 August 1849, surrendered to the Russians at Világos. Bem tried to fight on; according to Bálás he urged at a last council of war at Lugos that the war be continued, then crossed into Transylvania with the remnants of the army and on 17 August handed over his command and left for the Ottoman Empire. Dembiński too went into exile, first in the Ottoman Empire and then in Paris.5
Bem entered Ottoman service and died at Aleppo on 10 December 1850. His life, from the Napoleonic wars to Hungary and Syria, is told in our biography of Józef Bem; his guns at Ostrołęka in 1831 appear in our article on the Battle of Ostrołęka.6
