There was no time to be lost indeed. The fortifications of Vienna were a mere heap of ruins. The Imperial Palace was battered to pieces. Nearly one whole quarter of the city was in ashes. On the 3rd of September, the long contested Burg ravelin was yielded to the Turks. On the 4th, the salient angle of the Burg bastion was blown into the air, and an attack was with difficulty repelled. On the 6th, a similar mine and assault following cumbered the LÖwel bastion with ruin and with corpses. For a moment, the horse tails were planted upon the ramparts. Driven back thence with difficulty, the Turks still clung to the Burg ravelin, and four pieces of cannon planted there, at frightfully close quarters, completed the ruin of the works. But no new attack came. Informed of the advance of Lorraine, though still incredulous of the presence of Sobieski, the Vizier began to draw his troops towards the foot of the Kahlenberg. He still clung to the batteries and trenches; still kept the pick of his Janissaries grappling with the prize which but for him they might have already won. He rejected the advice of the Pasha of Pesth, to withdraw across the Wien and fortify a camp on the Wienersberg, secure that if the Christians attacked and failed Vienna would fall. He withdrew his troops indeed from the Leopoldstadt, and threw up some slight works towards the Kahlenberg, but remained otherwise irresolute, halting between his expected booty and her deliverer.

Sobieski had already taken the measure of his opponent. In reply to desponding views of Lorraine at Tuln, he had said, "Be of good cheer; which of us at the head of two hundred thousand men would have allowed this bridge to have been thrown within five leagues of his camp?" To his wife he wrote, "A commander who has thought neither of entrenching his camp, nor of concentrating his forces, but who lies encamped there as if we were one hundred miles off, is predestined to be beaten." Viewing the Turkish force from the Kahlenberg, he said to his soldiers, "This man is badly encamped, he knows nothing of war; we shall beat him."

It was well for the Christians and for Vienna that none of the great warriors who had served the Porte was now in command. No man like Kiuprili, or even like Ibrahim "the Devil," the last Turkish commander against whom Sobieski had contended, was there, to use the fidelity of the Janissaries and the valour of the Spahis to advantage. The march up the defiles of the Kahlenberg presented, even without interruptions, extraordinary difficulties. The king himself pushed forward to superintend the exploration of the way. He was so long parted from his Polish troops that they became anxious for his safety. He rejoined them at mid-day on the 11th, and encouraged them as they marched, or, as he says, rather climbed to the summit. Some Saxon troops, first arriving, with three guns, opened fire upon a Turkish detachment marching too late to secure the important position. The Turks retired, and the distant sound of the firing announced to Vienna the first tidings of deliverance. It was not till the evening of the 11th, however, that the main body of the army had reached the ridge. Even then many had lagged behind; the paths were nearly impracticable for artillery, and the Germans abandoned many of their guns in despair between Tuln and the Kahlenberg. But few pieces indeed were fired after the first beginning of the battle on the following day, Polish guns, for the most part, brought up by the vigour of the Grand Marshal of the Artillery, Kouski, the same officer who had directed the Polish field-pieces against the Turkish camp at Choczim.

"An hour before sunset," September 11, as Sobieski and the generals stood at length upon the crest of the hill, "they saw outspread before them one of the most magnificent yet terrible displays of human power which man has seen. There lay the valley and the islands of the Danube, covered with an encampment, the sumptuousness of which seemed better suited for an excursion of pleasure than for the hardships of war. Within it stood an innumerable multitude of animals—horses, camels, and oxen. Two hundred thousand fighting men moved in order here and there, while along the foot of the hills below swarms of Tartars roamed at will. A frightful cannonade was raging vigorously from the one side, in feeble reply from the other. Beneath the canopy of smoke lay a great city, visible only by her spires and her pinnacles, which pierced the overwhelming cloud and flame."[16] Sobieski estimated the force before him at one hundred thousand tents and three hundred thousand men. Including the non-combatants, he was, perhaps, not far wrong; but the fighting men in the Turkish army by this time would be by many fewer than that number. One hundred and sixty-eight thousand men is the most which may be allowed from the muster-rolls found in the Vizier's tent, and that certainly exceeds the truth.[17] All around, except where in the encampment the magnificence of the invader was proudly flaunted in the face of the ruin that he had made, the prospect was desolated by war. Whatever might be the fortune of the coming day, a generation at least must elapse before those suburbs are rebuilt, those villages restored and repeopled, those fields fully cultivated again. The army felt that it lay with them, under God, to provide against that further extension of the ravage which would follow, should the bulwark of the Oesterreich, the Eastern March of the Empire, be forced by Hun and Tartar.

Not distinguishable from the distance at which they stood, thousands of Christian captives lay in the encampment below. The morrow might deliver up the people of Vienna to a like fate with theirs. The city, as the king declared on entering it after the relief, could not have held out five days. As the wind now lifted the cloud of smoke, where should have been the fortifications, the eye could discern nothing but a circle of shapeless ruin, reaching from the Scottish gate to what had been the Burg bastion. Up to and on to it climbed the curving lines of the Turkish approaches.

Sobieski had only hoped gradually to fight his way into a position whence he could communicate with the besieged, and he had arranged his plan of battle at Tuln with that idea. But the inequalities of the country between the Kahlenberg and Vienna, broken with vines, villages, small hills and hollow ways, together with the unexpectedly rapid development of the attack when once it began, seem to have interfered with his original disposition.

His army occupied a front of half a Polish mile, or about an English mile and three quarters. It was drawn up in three supporting lines that faced south-eastward.

The first line of the right wing was composed of nineteen Polish (cavalry) divisions and four battalions; the second, of six Polish and eight Austrian divisions, and four Polish battalions; the third, of nine Polish, six Austrian, three German divisions, three Polish and one German battalion.

The centre was composed in the first line of nine Austrian and eleven German divisions, and thirteen German battalions; in the second, of six German divisions, ten German and six Austrian battalions; in the third, of five German and two Austrian battalions.

The left wing shewed in the first line, ten Austrian and five German divisions, and six Austrian battalions; in the second line, four German and eight Austrian divisions; in the third line, three German and seven Austrian battalions.

Lubomirski with his irregular Poles was on the left; the Polish Field-Marshal, Jablonowski, commanded on the right; the Prince of Waldeck, with the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, the centre; the Duke of Lorraine and Louis of Baden, with Counts Leslie and Caprara, were on the left. The king was upon the right or right centre throughout the day. The total force, including detachments not actually engaged, was 46,700 cavalry and dragoons, 38,700 infantry; in all 85,400 men, with some irregulars, and 168 guns, many of them not in action at all. The dragoons fought on foot in the battle.[18] The army was, roughly, one-third Poles, one-third Austrians, one-third Bavarians, Saxons, and other Germans.[19] The fatigues of the march from Tuln would naturally diminish the number of effective soldiers on the day of battle; and the troops were not all in position when the evening of Saturday, September 11, fell. As the night however wore away, the rear guard gained the summit of the hills, and snatched a brief repose before the labours of the morrow.

But for the king there was no rest. The man whom the French ambassador had described as unable to ride, who was tormented certainly by wearing pains, after three days of incessant toil, passed a sleepless night preparatory to fourteen hours in the saddle upon the battle-field. The season of repose was dedicated to the duties of a general and the affection of a husband. At three a.m. on Sunday, the 12th, the king is again writing to his bien-aimÉe Mariette. He has been toiling all day in bringing his troops up the ravines. "We are so thin," he writes, "we might run down the stags on the mountains." As to the pomp or even comfort of a king, that is not to be thought of. "All my luggage which we have got up here is in the two lightest carts." He has some more upon mules, but has not seen them for forty-eight hours. He had no thought of sleep; indeed, the thunder of the Turkish cannon made it impossible; and a gale of wind, which he describes as "sufficient to blow the men off their horses," bore the noise of their discharge with redoubled clamour to the relieving army. Moreover, the king writes, he must be in the saddle before daybreak, riding down from the right to the extreme left, to consult with Lorraine, opposite whom the enemy lies in force; not entrenched, he hopes, as on that side he means to break through to the city. A two days' affair, at least, he thinks. Then, "my eighth letter to your sixth," he adds, with other familiar and gentle conversation, with tidings of her son and of other friends, but with no word of fear or of apprehension. He had made his will before setting out from Warsaw, but he entertained no thought of failure. Then closing his wife's letter, the affectionate husband becomes again the heroic king and careful general. He rides from right to left along the lines, in that boisterous autumnal morning, makes the last dispositions with Lorraine, with him and with a few others takes again the Holy Communion from the hands of Marco Aviano before the sun has risen, and then returns to his post upon the right wing, ready for the advance that was to save Vienna. His next letter to his wife was dated "September 13, night. The tents of the Vizier."

[16] Coyer, "Memoires de Sobieski."