Meanwhile the Hungarian army had advanced to meet the enemy; but being ill officered and poorly drilled, with no experience whatever of actual fighting, it was easily routed. The Austrians had but to sweep the highway with their twelve-pounders, and the opposing centre gave way at once. It was a shameful defeat: all turned tail and ran before the enemy; and when the Congreve rockets were sent, ricochetting, hissing, and spitting fire, to explode among the panic-stricken fugitives, the chaos became complete. On such trying occasions, one man with his nerves under control is invaluable. Ödön Baradlay was no soldier, no born tactician, but he possessed that first requisite of success in any calling, self-control. As soon as he saw that the battle was going against his countrymen, although his place was in the rear as commissary-general, he threw himself on his horse and made an attempt to save the day. To rally the fugitives, demoralised as they were by the bursting of shells on every side, was hopeless. Along the highway he saw advancing a troop of the enemy's cavalry, sweeping everything before it. "Let us give them something to do," said he to himself, scanning the fleeing troops in quest of a few young men who might respond to his call. "Look here, boys," he shouted, "shall we let the enemy capture all our cannon without our striking a blow?" A little knot of sturdy lads paused in their flight at this call. They were only common soldiers, but they shouted to one another: "Let us die for our country!" and therewith faced about against the cavalry that came charging down upon them. Suddenly help appeared from an unexpected quarter: out of the acacia hedge that lined the highway such a raking fire was opened upon the cavalry that it was thrown into disorder and forced to beat a hasty retreat, leaving the road strewn with its dead and wounded. With loud huzzas there now sprang out from behind the hedge the Death's Head Legion, its leader, the long-legged Mausmann, waving his hat and calling to Ödön: "Hurrah, patron! That's what we call barricade tactics." Ödön welcomed the madcap student who had saluted him as "patron." The German students regarded him as their patron, because he saw to it that they received as good care as the rest of the army, and would not allow his countrymen to put any slight upon them. And they deserved all his kindness, the gallant lads; resolute under fire and always good-humoured, they were ever ready to fight and feared neither death nor the devil,--no, nor Congreve rockets, for that matter. They knew their foe, too, from many a sharp encounter in the past. A hundred such lads were of untold value at a critical moment like the present.