While I waited to speak, Archduke Maximilian rode up with a mounted escort. He addressed my great uncle by his rank, Feldmarschall-Leutnant, with no mention of his name. The archduke is forty years younger than my great-uncle, but a cousin of the Kaiser and also a Feldmarschall-Leutnant; he bears ultimate responsibility for preparing defences in Lower Austria and Vienna. He informed my uncle that he had sent the 2nd and 4th Vienna Volunteers out to attack the French in the minutes before the bombardment started, and had had no contact with them since. My uncle acknowledged this but passed no further comment. The archduke explained that he had been kept inside by his guard for his protection in the time since. He raised concerns about further cannon fire and the prospect of imminent attack, and my uncle gave relief to all around by assuring him that the bombardment had been a tactic to put fear into the hearts of those who knew no better, and that Napoléon would press his advantage no further for now.

I spoke to my uncle once the archduke had left, and told him I was there at Doctor Haydn’s bidding, seeking an assessment of the state of the war. He took me to the map, and pointed out the features I had already noticed, telling me he would make no secret of the French advance, and I was at liberty to share its extent with Doctor Haydn. I was also to tell him that we had troops in the city numbered in the tens of thousands, and that their present mission was to hold out until the army of Archduke Charles arrived and brought relief.

Then he spoke to me, as he put it, as one Irishman to another and a great-uncle to his great-nephew, and not for my master or for the streets and alleyways of Vienna, where there was already panic enough. He told me it is the burden of too many competent generals to be tasked with fighting the last war against an enemy already contemplating how he will fight the next one, and that Archduke Charles’ army is moving in the manner of the armies of the 1750s, and Napoléon’s is not. None had anticipated the Emperor’s arrival here so soon, and Archduke Charles is, at best, a week away.

He also informed me that Archduke Maximilian yesterday received a letter from Napoléon threatening ‘the ruin of an enormous capital by means of howitzers and bombs’ if Vienna resisted. My uncle saw this as an opening for negotiations, but fresh battalions of Austrian reserves arrived shortly after the letter, giving the archduke confidence that more would come; this led him to return the French Emperor’s letter with a flat refusal.

I told my uncle I had seen militias in the streets and he said, ‘Then you have seen the brave defenders of Vienna. Landwehr in from their farms with little training, boys without shoes, Poles with no love for the Habsburgs and horn in their muskets in place of flint.’