Hardly had Bassompierre finished supper that evening than a message arrived from Siegfried Colowitz to inform him that a reconnoitring party of the enemy had just landed on the island, and to request him, if he were in the mood for a little fighting, to put on his armour and have a horse saddled, as he was about to attack them. Shortly afterwards, Colowitz himself rode up, accompanied by a hundred or so of his Hungarians, one of whom he ordered to dismount and give his horse to Bassompierre, whose own charger he considered too heavy an animal for the work before them. They then galloped away, and, having come upon the Turks, charged them vigorously and forced them to beat a hasty retreat to their caiques and return to their own side of the river. The following night, however, the Turks succeeded in landing on the island in considerable force from caiques and pontoons, on the same spot which they had just reconnoitred and began hurriedly constructing entrenchments, with the object of holding the Imperialists at bay long enough to enable the rest of the Ottoman army to be brought across. They were so fiercely attacked, however, that they were soon obliged to retreat. A few days later, Bassompierre had a narrow escape of being killed or taken prisoner. “At daybreak on September 29,” he writes, “we issued from our great entrenchment with 200 Hungarian horse to reconnoitre the enemy; but we had not gone three hundred paces, when we perceived some hundred horsemen in front of us. The Hungarians, according to their custom, were dispersed in all directions, and we had not more than thirty with us, all of whom took to flight so soon as the enemy appeared. But I, who could not imagine that the Turks had advanced so far, and who could not distinguish them from the Hungarians, thought that they belonged to us, until an Hungarian fugitive called out to me: ‘_Heu, domine, adsunt Turcae!_’ which caused me to retreat also.”