these, and in rallying and collecting the troops, he pursued his march towards Pesth, not unmolested by the garrison of Raab, but throwing reinforcements into Neuhaüsel and Gran as he passed. The Polish army had, as has been stated, crossed the Danube near Komorn on the 4th and 5th, and the Imperial cavalry had followed; but the mass of the infantry was still behind. The King took the advance with a small body of his own cavalry, in the hopes of an easy conquest of the Turks, whom he knew to have hastily occupied the _tête-du-pont_ of Barkan. Forgetting, in his contempt for a beaten enemy, and in his anxiety to seize the Turkish bridge of boats near Barkan, the first rules of military science, and pressing forward without support or reserve, and without due security for co-operation from the more cautious Lorraine, he sacrificed some of his best troops, and narrowly escaped, in his own person and that of his son, the last penalty a soldier can pay for imprudence. The affair began with the advanced guard, which, according to the King’s rather exculpatory but graphic report to his wife, committed itself prematurely, and contrary to his orders, in a skirmish with the Turks near Barkan. Some accounts state that the latter were crafty enough to lure them on, by causing a herd of oxen to retire slowly before them. The Palatine of Russia, proceeding to the front, found it necessary to send in all haste for assistance, and the King in person brought up to the rescue his whole disposable force, making his numbers in the field some 5000 men, without infantry or artillery. He would have done more wisely to have left his advanced guard to their fate. He found it routed and disorganized, and himself with his small force, not yet deployed, within some hundred paces of an enemy flushed with success, and immensely superior in numbers. The Palatine of Russia, who saw the danger, implored him to leave the field. He replied to this invitation by charging at the head of his best available squadron. The charge succeeded, but at the same moment the centre and left wing, though not yet engaged with the enemy, gave way, and the conflict degenerated into a race for life and death. The young Prince, who in this affair, as in the battle of Vienna, had followed his father like his shadow, received from him a positive command to fly. The King himself lingered till every effort he could make to rally his people had utterly failed, and he was left with six companions. To two of these, Czerkass, a Lithuanian gentleman, and a nameless soldier of heavy cavalry, he himself mainly attributed his salvation. The latter, who shot down with his carbine one of two horsemen who had come up with the King, and wounded the other, perished; the former lived to enjoy a pension of 500 crowns paid to him by the Queen on every anniversary of this disastrous skirmish. For some two miles and more the furious race continued: the Palatine of Pomerelia fell, horse and man, and was cut to pieces.