The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

sub-lieutenant Elemér Szechányi and Ferenc Pehm, volunteer with the
Ostenburg battalion, lost their lives; two were critically wounded: Károly Held,
forestry engineering student and Lajos Zorkóczy, student from Budapest. The
unit of Captain Pál Gebhardt and 1 st Lt. Varga hurried to the aid of the student
company and managed to attack the flank of the Austrians, who began to flee.
More reinforcements arrived with Maj. Ostenburg and the occupiers were
finally routed.
Austrian eyewitnesses, among them Johann Müllner, superintendent of the
Graz district gendarmerie, admitted in his diary (Der Kampf bei Agendorf /
Battle at Ágfalva): their good fortune while escaping was that the rebels
intentionally aimed high above their heads. 362 Lajos Krug, who took part in the
Ágfalva mêlée, himself noted: if they wanted, they could have picked off the
occupiers one by one, of whom only one gendarme was killed and two
seriously wounded. The latter both died of their wounds, in the hospitals in
Sopron and Wiener Neustadt. The first reports in the Vienna papers, true to
their habit of overstating the facts, told of 60 Austrian dead and more than a
hundred wounded, in an attack by a 2,000-strong Hungarian unit, reinforced by
artillery. All the while, the goal of the rebels was to frighten and put to flight
the Austrians, not to massacre them; to drive out the intruding enemy from the
ancient Hungarian lands, which was completely successful. One of the means
used at Ágfalva was the so-called ‘spare cannon,’ which was nothing more than
a water-filled barrel. Firing into the barrel gave off the sound of a medium
caliber cannon. The Austrian gendarmes, retreating in a hail of bullets, fled in
the direction of Lépesfalva (Loipersbach im Burgenland) and, reaching the
railway tracks, climbed aboard a slow-moving train that took them into
Nagymarton. Shortly after the encounter, Entente officers from Sopron arrived
on the scene, along with Commissioner Sigray, and Gyula Ostenburg reported
to him the events of the combat. Next, the gendarmes of his battalion disarmed
the rebels and Ostenburg sent them marching under guard towards Sopron.
However, when they reached the edge of the forest, they were let go. Lajos
Krug and others attest to this. 363 Sopron was saved for Hungary by the second,
and equally victorious, battle of Ágfalva because Austria could not present the
Paris Peace Conference with a fait accompli by marching in and militarily
taking over the city. In the following three days, the rebels ejected the Austrian
gendarmes from Western Hungary, leaving only Királyhida (Bruckneudorf),
Lajtaújfalu (Neufeld an der Leitha) and Lajtaszentmiklós (Neudörfl an der
Leitha) in Austrian hands. Subsequently, there were only local clashes against
362 Hiller, op. cit., p. 88.
363 Krug, 1930, op. cit., pp. 59-80; Missuray-Krug, op. cit., pp. 110-127; Tóth, Alajos,
1932, op. cit., p. 95-103; Maderspach, 1926. In. Magyarság, year VII, January 21, p, 4;
January 22, p. 4; January 23, p. 6; Stelczer, István: Kik vívták meg az ágfalvai ütközetet
[Who fought in the battle of Ágfalva]? In: Magyarság, year X, 1929, September 19, p.
6; Héjjas J., 1929, op. cit., pp. 24-28. More recently, Károlyfalvi, József: A nyugatmagyarországi
felkelés és Kecskemét [The Western Hungary insurrection and
Kecskemét]. In: Kapu, 2001, issue 10, pp. 24-25.
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