Kościuszko / A Biography

by Monica M. Gardner

We have reached the month of May, 1794. Kościuszko and the Russian army under Denisov were now at close grips, Denisov repeatedly attacking, Kościuszko beating him off. Communications with Warsaw and all the country were impeded. Provisions were almost impossible to procure. Kościuszko's men went half starved. Burning villages, set on fire by Denisov's soldiers, a countryside laid waste, were the sight the Poles beheld each day, while the homeless peasants crowded into Kościuszko's camp to tell him their piteous stories. Then Denisov retreated so swiftly towards the Prussian frontier that Kościuszko, either through the enemy's rapidity, or because he was detained by the civil affairs of the government with which his hands were just then full, and by the no less arduous task of organizing the war in the provinces, was not able to overtake him. At this moment the Rising promised well. The Polish regiments, escaping from Russian garrisons, augmented the number of the army that, against unheard-of difficulties—short of money, short of all military requisites—Kościuszko had by the end of May gathered together. From Kiev, under the very eyes of the Russian troops in the town. Kopeć—who for his share in the national war later underwent exile in the penal settlements of Kamchatka—led a band of Polish soldiers to Kościuszko's Rising. They had already been in communication with the Poles who were preparing the Rising in Warsaw, when the news of the outbreak of the insurrection reached them. Catherine II at once resolved to disarm them and send them to the Crimea. Kopeć was despatched by the Russian authorities to convey to the Polish soldiers flattering promises from the Empress of pay and rewards. He seized the opportunity for a different purpose, took the oath of the Rising from his compatriots and succeeded in leading them out of Kiev. Halting on the way at Uszomierz, he repaired in the middle of the night to the Carmelite convent, to beg the blessing of the old monk, Marek, who had preached with the fire of a Bernard the Bar war, and around whose white-robed figure among the patriots fighting for freedom tales of miracle had gathered. Rising from his bed of sickness, the old man went out with Kopeć, crucifix in hand, to the Polish soldiers, and gave them his blessing, adding the words: "Go in the name of God and you shall pass through." Eluding the strong Russian forces that were on all sides, they effected their escape, and, singing the ancient battle hymn of Poland, marched to the banners of Kościuszko.

We have seen that Kościuszko held the war as a sacred crusade. He enforced rigid discipline. Licence was unknown in his camp, where the atmosphere, so eyewitnesses have recorded, was that of gaiety and ardour tempered by a grave enthusiasm.

"There is here," writes the envoy whom Kościuszko was sending to Vienna and whom he had summoned to the camp to receive his instructions, "neither braggadocio nor excess. A deep silence reigns, great order, great subordination and discipline. The enthusiasm for Kościuszko's person in the camp and in the nation is beyond credence. He is a simple man, and is one most modest in conversation, manners, dress. He unites with the greatest resolution and enthusiasm for the undertaken cause much sang-froid and judgment. It seems as though in all that he is doing there is nothing temerarious except the enterprise itself. In practical details he leaves nothing to chance: everything is thought out and combined. His may not be a transcendental mind, or one sufficiently elastic for politics. His native good sense is enough for him to estimate affairs correctly and to make the best choice at the first glance. Only love of his country animates him. No other passion has dominion over him."[1]

[1] T. Korzon, Kościuszko.

The name of Kościuszko is linked, not with victory but with a defeat more noble than material triumph. The watchword he had chosen for the Rising, "Death or Victory," was no empty rhetoric; it was stern reality. The spring of 1794 saw the insurrection opening in its brilliant promise. From May the success of an enterprise that could have won through with foreign help, and not without it, declined Kościuszko had now to reckon not only with Russia Prussia was about to send in her regiments of iron against the little Polish army, of which more than half were raw peasants bearing scythes and pikes, and which was thus hemmed in by the armed legions of two of the most powerful states in Europe.

On the 6th of June Kościuszko reached Szczekociny. It was among the marshes there that the Polish army met the fiercest shock of arms it had yet experienced in the course of the Rising. "The enemy," wrote Kościuszko in his report, "stood all night under arms. We awaited the dawn with the sweetest hope of victory." These hopes were founded on the precedent of Racławice and on the battles in which Kościuszko had fought in the United States, where he had seen British regulars routed by the American farmers. But as hostilities were about to begin with the morning, Wodzicki, examining the proceedings through his field-glasses, expressed his amazement at the masses moving against the Polish army. "Surely my eyes deceive me, for I recognize the Prussians," he said to a Polish officer at his side. It was too true. In the night the Prussian army had come up under Frederick William II. "We saw," says Kościuszko "that it was not only with the Russians we had to deal, for the right wing of the enemy was composed of the Prussian army." The Poles fought with desperate valour. Kościuszko himself records the name of a Polish sergeant who, "when both of his legs were carried off by a cannon-ball, still cried out to his men, "Brothers, defend your country! Defend her boldly. You will conquer!"[1] The charges of the Polish reapers went far to turn the tide of victory; but the overwhelming numbers of Prussian soldiers, and of scientific machines of war in a ratio of three to Kościuszko's one, carried the day against the Poles. Kościuszko's horse was shot under him, and himself slightly wounded. Only two of his generals emerged from the battle unscathed. The rest were either killed, including the gallant Wodzicki and another who, like him, had been one of the earliest promoters of the Rising, and the others wounded, Poninski redeeming by his blood a father's infamy.

[1] Kościuszko. Periodical Publication.

There was no choice left open to Kościuszko, if he would save an army composed for the most part of inexperienced volunteers, but to order a retreat. This retreat was carried out in perfect order. The field was strewn with Polish dead, whom, after the withdrawal of the Prussians, the villagers piously buried in their parish church. There, too, on the battlefield, lay so many corpses of Prussian soldiers that Frederick William expressed the hope that he would gain few more such costly victories. It was at the close of this disastrous defeat that Kościuszko for a moment gave way to despair. An officer of his—Sanguszko—met him wandering stupefied over the battlefield when the day was lost. "I wish to be killed," was all Sanguszko heard him say. Sanguszko only saved his general's life by gripping him by the arm and forcing him within the turnpike of a village hard by, where the shattered Polish ranks had taken refuge. This was, however, but a momentary faltering of Kościuszko's soul. On the morrow of the battle he was once more sending his country summonses to a renewed courage and calling up a fresh general levy.

The proivisional government of Poland was the while negotiating with France and Austria. It was hoped that France would support the Rising financially, and persuade Turkey with French encouragement to declare war on Russia. France, preoccupied with internal revolution, had no thought to spare for Polish affairs, and her assistance was never gained. Nor had the Poles' overtures to Austria any happy result. The Austrian Government gave secret orders to arrest Kościuszko and Madalinski if they crossed the frontier, and the Austrian regiments received instructions to attack any Polish insurgents who should pass over into Galicia, providing that the Austrians were superior in number. The favourable answer obtained through a French intermediary from the Porte arrived after Kościuszko was in a Russian prison. By the irony of fate he never heard it, and it was only divulged thirty years after his death. Thus every diplomatic means failed the patriot, who was no match for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause. Immediately after his eyes had been opened at Szczekociny to the new peril that had burst upon his country he sent out another order, bidding his commanders to "go over the Prussian and Russian boundaries" into the provinces that were lawfully Poland's but which had been filched from her at the partitions, "and proclaiming there the freedom and the rising of the Poles, summon the peasants oppressed and ground down with slavery to join us and universally arm against the usurpers and their oppression:" to do the same in Russia proper and Prussia, to all "who are desirous of returning to the sweet liberties of their own country or desirous to obtain a free country."[1]

[1] T. Korzon, Kościuszko.