Buda (04-21 May 1849). Quite in the first day in his office in Debrecen Klapka had a conflict with Sándor Petőfi, the Hungarian national poet, then a major in the Army of Transylvania under the command of Lieutenant General Józef Bem. The cause of the conflict was the article written by Petőfi in the newspaper Honvéd, in which he published a letter of Bem against general Károly Vécsey, accusing the latter of high treason, cowardice and incapacity, because he did not help Bem in his failed attempt to capture the fortress of Temesvár. Hearing about this Klapka and other Hungarian generals, who were on Vécsey's side, accused Petőfi of being undisciplined, dressing not accordingly to a soldier, besmirching the Hungarian army to the public, thus weakening the will of the nation to fight against the enemy. Klapka was angered on Petőfi also because of the poet's former conflicts with other Hungarian officers and war ministers like Lieutenant General Antal Vetter and Lieutenant General Lázár Mészáros (against whom he wrote also a satirical poem), so he reprimanded the poet, who came to the war office seeking permission to go to the freshly liberated Pest, to bury his father. At the end of the quarrel, seeing that Klapka would not allow him to go, Petőfi promptly resigned his military title and quit the army. After this, thinking himself free from military discipline, Petőfi wrote a letter to Klapka, declaring that he cannot bear offenses from Klapka, which offended his dignity, and wrote a poem entitled Egy goromba tábornokra (About a Rude General), in which he named Klapka an unworthy man and a weak general. Klapka prosecuted Petőfi for this, and when he met him on 14 May at Pest, he arrested the poet. Petőfi was saved by General Görgei, whose favorite poet he was, liberating him from the arrest, sending a deputation made of officers to ask for pardon from Klapka in the name of Petőfi. In the middle of May 1849, the news about the upcoming Russian intervention spread throughout Hungary, and the need to take measures against this grave danger became imminent. The enemy had a huge numerical advantage against the Hungarian army: the attacking Russian and Austrian armies had 358 000 soldiers (plus another 75 000 soldiers in Galicia and Walachia in reserve) and 770 cannons against 150 000 Hungarian soldiers with 440 cannons. In the second part of