The ground was heavy, and intersected with deep furrows: the King, though not so inactive as the French ambassador had described him, was both tall and corpulent; and when at length he pulled up and rallied his people on the cavalry and guns of the German troops, which at the instance of the Austrian General Dunnewald, attached in this affair to the staff of the King, were coming up to his support, breathless, and covered with bruises from rough contact with the companions of his flight, he lay for a while exhausted on a heap of straw. The Abbé Coyer has a story of the King’s witnessing the escape of his son, as he left his cloak in the hand of a Turkish horseman. The King expressly states that Fanfan, as he always calls his son, was _bien en avant_ with the grand _écuyer_ Mateinski, to whom the Abbé and others also have attributed the preservation of the King. Most of the King’s personal attendants, pages, &c., perished; he mentions a negro boy, a young Hungarian, master of several languages, but dwells with most interest on the fate of a little Calmuck, a famous rider in the King’s hare-coursing pastimes.[20] In spite of his horsemanship he was captured, but by some strange accident spared by the Turks. After their subsequent defeat he was found in their camp and recognised by the Poles, but an unlucky German cut him down. There are many instances in which the greatest commanders have had to ride for their lives. In our own times the list would comprise names no less than those of Napoleon, Murat, and Blücher; but the Cossack hourra of Brenne, and the skirmish near Leipzick, were accidents of warfare which no prudence could avert, and the gallant charge of Ligny few would be found to censure. The race of Barkan is historically valuable for the lesson it conveys of caution in the hour of success. An adherence to the simplest rules of military science would have saved two thousand lives. Sobieski’s character shines out conspicuously in the manner in which he took this severe check. Like the old Prussian of 1815, though bruised and stiffened, and scarcely able to sit his horse, he was up and ready on the following day, pressing the Duke of Lorraine to move against the Turks. In his religious convictions he was earnest, perhaps to the verge of bigotry, and in his letters to his wife in tracing the disaster to the judgment of Providence on the licence and crimes of the army, he passes over rather lightly the share which his own incaution had in producing it.