Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. The poem triggered a massive demonstration in the streets of the city, which forced the Emperor's representatives to accept the end of censorship and the release of all political prisoners. The Revolution eventually resulted in a civil war between a Hungarian Republican Government led by Lajos Kossuth and Hungarian Monarchists, many of whom were ethnic minorities, who remained loyal to the House of Hapsburg. In response, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had been raised on stories of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, ordered the Imperial Russian Army to enter Hungary and to ally themselves with the monarchists. Despite efforts by General Józef Bem to keep him out of danger, Petőfi insisted on going into combat against the Monarchists and their Russian allies. Petőfi is believed to have either been killed in action during the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849, or to have subsequently died in a Tsarist penal colony near Barguzin, in Siberia. At the time of his presumed death, Petőfi was only 26 years old. Despite the defeat of the uprising, Petőfi's poetry and nostalgia for the 1848 Revolution have become a major part of Hungary's national identity. According to Reg Gadney, the anti-communist Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began on 23 October 1956, when 20,000 student protesters gathered around the statue of Sándor Petőfi on the Pest side of the Danube River. During the gathering, Nemzeti Dal was recited to the demonstrators by Imre Sinkovics, a young actor from the Budapest National Theater. The demonstrators then read out a list of sixteen demands to the Communist Government of Hungary, laid wreaths at the foot of the statue, and crossed the Danube to Buda, where the demonstration continued before the statue of General Józef Bem. Like Petőfi's first reading of the poem on 15 March 1848, the demonstration grew into a city-wide affair, and then into a temporarily successful nationwide uprising against the existing regime, which was only quelled by the intervention of the Russian Army. Crimean War Probably the most famous 19th-century war poem is Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which he supposedly wrote in only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times. As poet laureate, he often wrote verses about public events. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in