But Palmerston was wrong; and Austria, neither for the first nor for the last time in her history, defeated the predictions of the prophets. She has been called the Sick Woman, as Turkey used to be called the Sick Man, of Europe; but the Sick Woman has had a wonderfully elastic constitution, and has been wonderfully favoured by the chapter of accidents. Again and again in her history we have a vision of _disjecta membra_ re-attaching themselves, as it were, to the disabled trunk, so that it could once more get up and walk. It was so in 1849, when, the Poles having risen to help the Hungarians, the Russians, knowing what they themselves might have to fear from victorious Poles, crossed the frontier to Francis Joseph’s rescue. That accident—happy or unhappy as one likes to regard it—turned the scale in the nick of time; and the rest was butchery, akin to that of the White Terror in France, but worse—a blood bath which scandalised Europe: the campaign of Haynau—called the Hyaena because of his grim chuckles at the sufferings which he caused—against the defenceless. Certain excesses had been committed, in the early days of the revolutionary excitement—the War Minister, Latour, among others, had fallen a victim to mob violence. Those excesses were now avenged, not merely on the mob, but on the middle classes and on the Magnates. Croatian soldiers were turned loose on Hungarian towns, with a free hand to loot and ravish. Hungarian officers—officers who were also noblemen—were impressed as private soldiers, and placed in Austrian regiments, with the deliberate purpose of breaking their spirits. That was the treatment meted out even to some members of the great Hungarian houses of Esterhazy and Batthyany; and a Baron Podanitzky, who had been impressed in the artillery, was actually flogged in the streets of a Hungarian town on some absurd charge of having lost part of a bag of corn entrusted to his care. Even women were flogged. Here is the deposition of one of them, published at the time in every newspaper in Europe—the truth of the story being confirmed, after inquiry on the spot, by the special correspondent of _The Times_:— “Some imperialist troops entered Ruskby. It is probable that my enviable family happiness had created enemies at Ruskby, and that they were resolved to destroy it, for I am not aware that any of us had committed any fault. I was suddenly, without a previous trial or examination, taken from my husband and children. I was dragged into a square formed by the troops, and in the place in which I reside, and in the presence of its population, which had been accustomed to honour me, not because I was the Lady of the Manor, but because the whole tenor of my life deserved it, _I was flogged with rods_. You see I can write the words without dying of shame; but my husband took his own life. Deprived of all other weapons, he shot himself with a small cannon.”