Józef Bem: the Polish general who became a Hungarian hero

Few soldiers are heroes in two countries. Józef Bem fought for Poland's freedom in 1831, and when that cause was lost he carried the fight to the barricades of Vienna and then to the mountains of Transylvania, where a small, ragged army under his command cleared the province of imperial troops in three months. He died a pasha in Aleppo, far from both of the nations that remember him.¹

Early life: the gunner from Tarnów

Bem was born in Tarnów, in Austrian Galicia, on 14 March 1794, and grew up in Kraków. In 1809, aged fifteen, he joined the army of the Duchy of Warsaw raised under Prince Józef Poniatowski as a gunner, and went through the artillery and engineering school in Warsaw. He was shy enough that a friend nicknamed him "panienka", the little miss, a name that did not survive his first campaign.²

He was commissioned in 1810 and went to Russia with Napoleon in 1812 as an artillery officer of the X Corps. Near Riga he attacked a Russian post with a handful of gunners and brought back prisoners, and was put under arrest for acting without orders. In 1813 he distinguished himself in the long defense of Danzig, leading raid after raid against the besiegers, and that year he received the cross of the Legion of Honour.³

Rise: rockets, a quarrel and a revolution

After 1815 Bem stayed in the army of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, a Russian-ruled state with its own Polish army. He taught at the artillery school, experimented with the Congreve war rocket and published a study of it, and wrote on artillery and mathematics. The army of Grand Duke Constantine was not a comfortable home for an independent mind. After the death of Tsar Alexander I in 1825 Bem, by then a captain, left the army and went back to Galicia to work on industrial projects such as sugar refining.⁴

When the November Uprising broke out in Warsaw on 29 November 1830, he returned at once and was given command of the 4th light horse battery as a major. At Iganie that spring his guns tore into a Russian infantry column, and one Polish officer called the result "a formal slaughter".⁵ › The Battle of Olszynka Grochowska, 1831

Campaigns

Ostrołęka and Warsaw, 1831

On 26 May 1831, at the Battle of Ostrołęka, the Polish army under Jan Skrzynecki was caught astride the Narew river and close to disaster. Bem's batteries arrived late, galloped close to the Russian line and opened fire at short range, losing heavily but checking the enemy long enough for the army to get away. The Russian commander, Hans Karl von Diebitsch, read the sudden fire as the arrival of fresh troops. Bem was promoted to colonel on the field and later to general, received the Gold Cross of the Virtuti Militari, and was remembered as "the bloody star of Ostrołęka".⁶

In September 1831 he commanded the artillery in the defense of Warsaw. He reached the battle late, blamed headquarters for not warning him, and then pushed toward Wola to slow the Russian assault. The city fell all the same, and Bem went into exile with thousands of other Polish officers.⁷

Exile and the barricades of Vienna, 1848

The emigration years were hard. Bem tried to raise a Polish legion for Portugal and failed, tried to serve in Belgium and failed again, and lived in poverty before settling in Lwów. When revolution swept Europe in 1848 he went to Vienna. In October, as imperial troops closed in on the rebellious capital, he became the de facto commander of its defense through days of street fighting. Badly wounded in the chest, and fifty-four years old, he gave up the command and escaped in disguise to Hungary shortly before imperial troops took the city by storm on 31 October.⁸

Transylvania, 1848 to 1849

From Vienna Bem went to Hungary, which was fighting the Habsburgs for its constitution and then its independence. Lajos Kossuth gave him the hardest front, Transylvania, where Austrian forces under Anton Puchner held most of the province. On 20 December 1848 Bem attacked with about 10,000 men and 16 field guns, according to the Hungarian Academy's history of the province, and by Christmas his troops were celebrating in Kolozsvár (Cluj), the first Hungarian success in months.⁹

The winter turned against him. A first attempt on Nagyszeben (Sibiu), the Austrian headquarters, failed with heavy losses, a Russian force of some 7,000 men entered the province to help the Austrians, and Bem was beaten at Vízakna and driven back to Déva. On 9 February 1849 he made his stand at the bridge over the Strei at Piski. The fight lasted all day and was the bloodiest of the campaign; one national guard battalion lost between a third and a half of its men, but Bem held the bridge and threw back a superior force.¹⁰

Reinforced to about 8,000 men, he then outmarched his opponents. On 11 March 1849 he took Nagyszeben by surprise, and within days drove Puchner's Austrians and the Russian detachments out of Transylvania. By the middle of March only the fortresses of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia) and Déva held out. Bem went on into the Banat in the spring and repulsed an Austrian attack from Wallachia.¹¹

The poet Sándor Petőfi, whose "Talpra magyar" had become the anthem of the revolution, served as Bem's aide-de-camp, and the old general had a soft spot for the unsoldierly young man.¹²

Segesvár and Temesvár, 1849

The tide turned when Russia came to Austria's aid in force. A joint Austro-Russian offensive opened in June 1849, and Transylvania was invaded from several sides. On 31 July 1849, at Segesvár (Sighișoara), a much larger Russian force crushed Bem's army. Petőfi vanished in the fighting and his body was never found; Bem escaped only by feigning death.¹³

In August Kossuth named Bem commander-in-chief of the Hungarian army. It was a command over a collapsing cause. On 9 August 1849 he attacked Julius von Haynau's Austrians at Temesvár (Timișoara) and was beaten, a defeat that broke the power of the revolution for good.¹⁴ › The Battle of Temesvár, 1849

Character and command style

Bem was a gunner first and last. He wrote on artillery and rockets, and on the battlefield he used his guns the way a cavalry commander uses horsemen: brought up fast, close to the enemy, at the decisive point. At Iganie and Ostrołęka that boldness turned battles, and in Transylvania it made up for his lack of numbers.¹⁵

He was also a political commander in a province torn between Hungarians, Romanians and Saxons. He courted the support of Hungarian and Romanian peasants, offered amnesties, and in the summer of 1849 suspended the summary courts that were hanging people in his rear. Not every Hungarian politician approved, but his soldiers did, and the Hungarians gave him the name they still use: Bem apó, Father Bem.¹⁶

Death and legacy

After the surrender Bem crossed into the Ottoman Empire with part of his army. To avoid extradition to Austria or Russia and to keep a sword in his hand, he converted to Islam and entered the Sultan's service as Murad Pasha. Under an agreement between Constantinople and Saint Petersburg he was interned at Aleppo in Syria, away from politics. There he organized the defense of the city when it was attacked in 1850 and, according to Britannica, protected its Christian population from massacre. He died of malaria in Aleppo on 10 December 1850.¹⁷

Bem was buried in Aleppo's Muslim military cemetery. In June 1929 his remains were exhumed in the presence of French, Polish, Hungarian and Turkish representatives and carried by special train through Turkey and Yugoslavia to Budapest, where the coffin lay in state at the Hungarian National Museum, and then to Kraków and the courtyard of Wawel Castle. On 30 June 1929 he was laid to rest in Tarnów, in a mausoleum by the architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz that stands on an island in a pond in Strzelecki Park.¹⁸

In Hungary his memory took on a life of its own. On 23 October 1956 Budapest students marched to his statue in solidarity with the Poles, whose own protests that year had encouraged them, and the march became the first day of the Hungarian Revolution. A Polish general who died a Turkish pasha had become the symbol of a friendship between two nations.¹⁹ › For Your Freedom and Ours