[3] A. Chołoniewski, Tadeusz Kościuszko. Lwów, 1902 (Polish).
[1] Kościuszko. Periodical Publication, 1893-6. Cracow (Polish).
Three days after Warsaw was freed, Wilno, with a handful of soldiers rising in the night, drove out the Russian garrison, and the Russian army retreated through Lithuania, marking their way by atrocities which were but a foretaste of what awaited in no distant future that most unhappy land.
"The powerful God," says the pronunciamento of the Provisional Deputy Council of Wilno—"delivering the Polish nation from the cruel yoke of slavery has, O citizens of Lithuania, sent Tadeusz Kościuszko, our fellow-countryman, to the holy soil to fulfil His will. By reason of the valour of that man whose very dust your posterity will honour and revere, the liberties of the Poles have been born again. At the name alone of that knightly man the Polish land has taken another form, another spirit has begun to govern the heart of the dweller in an oppressed country. ... To him we owe our country! To him we owe the uplifting of ourselves, to his virtue, to his zeal and to his courage."[1]
[1] K. Bartoszewicz, History of Kościuszko's Insurrection.
The burden that rested on the shoulders of Kościuszko was one that would have seemed beyond the mastery of one man. He had to raise an army, find money, ammunition, horses, provisions. He had to initiate and organize the Rising in every province, bearing in mind and appealing to the distinctive individualities of each, dealing in his instructions not merely with the transcendentally difficult material matters of the Rising, but with involved moral questions. He was the military chief, responsible for the whole plan of action of a war for national existence. He was the civil chief, chosen to rule the nation when the most skilful steering of the ship of state was requisite—when the government of the country, owing to dismemberment, foreign intrigues, foreign invasion, internal disunion, was in a condition of chaos. The soundest political acumen, the most unerring tact, was exacted of him. He must needs adopt whatever political measures he deemed necessary, no matter how hard of execution: many of these were innovations that he daringly carried out against every prejudice and tradition, because it was the innermost conviction of his soul that they would save his nation. No doubt Kościuszko's great talent for organization and application, and the robust strength of his character, would, in part at least, have borne him through his herculean task; but it was in the power of the idea that we must find the key to his whole leadership of the struggle for his nation which in the history of that nation bears his name. Where Poland was concerned obstacles were not allowed to exist—or rather, were there merely to be overcome. Personal desires, individual frictions, all must go down before the only object that counted.
"Only the one necessity," he writes to Mokronowski, reassuring the General in brotherly and sympathetic style as to some unpleasantness that the latter was anticipating—for, with all his devotion to the common end, Kościuszko never failed to take to his heart the private griefs, even the trifling interests, of those around him—"the one consideration of the country in danger has caused me to expect that, putting aside all personal vexations, you will sacrifice yourself entirely to the universal good. ... Not I, but our country, beseeches and conjures you to do this. Surely at her voice all delays, all considerations, should perish."[1]
[1] Letters of Kościuszko.
Impressing upon a young prince of the Sapieha family, at the outset of the Rising, that he "must not lose even a minute of time ... although," Kościuszko says, "the forces be weak, a beginning must be made, and those forces will increase of themselves in the defence of the country. I began with one battalion, and in a few days I had collected an army. Let the gentry go out on horseback, and the people with scythes and pikes." Let the officers who had been trained to a different service abroad put aside preconceived ideas, and fight in the methods demanded of a popular army.[1]
Or, far on towards the end of the Rising, Kościuszko, calling upon the citizens of Volhynia to rise for the Poland from which they had been torn away, speaks thus: "You have no army in your own land, but you have men, and those men will soon become an army." He tells them that the Poles who rose in Great Poland were not deterred by the differences of religious belief between them. "These hinder not at all the love of country and of freedom. Let each honour God according to his faith"—Kościuszko himself was a devout Catholic—"and there is no faith that would forbid a man to be free."[2]