[1] J. Niemcewicz, op. cit.
So long as the army marched through Poland, Kościuszko had the mournful satisfaction of receiving here and there on the road some last token of recognition and honour from his compatriots. At one spot where the Russian officers quartered themselves on the castle of the Sanguszkos, while Kościuszko and his companions were lodged in the wretched village inn, the Princess, unable to show her compassion in any other way, provided the Poles with all their meals, prepared by her chef. Another Polish princess, whose mansion was twenty miles distant, and who was no other than Ludwika Lubomirska, sent over her young son with clothes and books for the prisoners. They were still in this village when a courier arrived, bearing the news of the fall of Warsaw, and of the massacre of Praga which has gained for the name of Suvorov its eternal infamy in the history of Poland. Thirteen thousand of the civilian inhabitants of Warsaw, men, women, and children, were put to the sword, immolated in the flames, or drowned in the Vistula as they fled over a broken bridge before the fury of the Russian soldiers. Thus ended the Rising of Kościuszko. If under one aspect it closed in failure, on the other side it had proved to the admiration and belated sympathy of all Europe how Poles could fight for freedom. Moreover, it laid the foundation for those later Polish insurrections in the cause of liberty which, no less heroic than the Rising of Kościuszko, and with a sequel as tragic, are honoured among the world's splendid outbursts of nationalism.
Following close on this blow came painful partings between Kościuszko and his devoted comrades, Kniaziewicz, Kopeć, and the remaining Polish officers. Kościuszko, with Niemcewicz and Fiszer, were separated from the main army, and sent on under the escort of a small body of Russian officers and soldiers. With hearts torn by grief they said farewell to their friends, never expecting to see them again. Haunted by the thought of the unknown fate before them and by the terrible news from their country, they set out through a snowstorm that blotted out all discernible objects, the horses sinking into the snow which clogged the carriage wheels at every turn. Rigorously guarded, each word of their conversation noted and handed on to the commander, the prisoners were conveyed in as great secrecy as possible, and were not allowed to halt at any large town. At Czernihov two Cossack officers brought them a tray of fine apples, telling them—they spoke in Polish—that Polish blood flowed in their veins and that they deeply deplored the lot of the captives. More they were about to add when the Russian guard drove them off. Traversing White Ruthenia, a country that had so lately been Poland's, the people watched them pass, not in curiosity, but rather with looks of interest and compassion. As they changed horses before a posting-house in Mohylev a tall, thin old peasant, in Polish costume, was observed by the prisoners among the groups that pressed around them to be gazing at them with eyes filled with pity, till at last, unable to contain himself longer, he broke his way through to them, weeping, only to be thrust aside by the Russian officer in charge. At Witebsk, again, a band of recruits in the Russian army respectfully uncovered their heads as Kościuszko passed, and he knew that they were Poles. These little incidents cast their transitory gleam over the journey north, as the party pushed on to Petersburg, across the desolate snow-covered plains of Russia, through the piercing cold of the Russian winter. At night the fires of the aurora borealis threw a strange, blood-red light over the white, unending country. The gloomy silence that held all nature in its grip was only broken by an occasional crash of a bough under the weight of snow in the great forests through which the party passed, or by the wild, sad music of the Russian songs with which the postilions beguiled the night hours of their journey. Such was the accompaniment to Kościuszko's forebodings for his future and that of his fellow-captives, and to his greater anguish over the fate of his nation.
Petersburg was reached on the 10th of December. The prisoners were hurried at night through side streets, and then put into boats and taken by mysterious waterways into the heart of the Peter- Paul fortress. Here they were separated, Niemcewicz and Fiszer led to a large hall, and Kościuszko conducted to another room. That was the last they saw of each other for two years. On the morning after his first night of solitary confinement Niemcewicz was brought coffee in a cup that he recognized as Kościuszko's property. This alone told him that Kościuszko was not far off; and cheered by that thought he was able, says he, "to resign himself to everything."[1]
[1] J. Niemcewicz, op. cit.
The narrative of Niemcewicz, to which we owe the story of each step of the journey into Russia, can now, beyond a vague report that the poet from time to time gleaned from his jailors, tell us next to nothing more of Kościuszko in a Russian prison. Detailed information from other sources is wanting, and we have only a few certain facts to go upon. For the first few months of his imprisonment, Kościuszko was Kept in the fortress as a rebel, not as a vanquished enemy. "Rebel" was the term by which he was officially styled. Before December was out, he was subjected to the usual ordeal of the Russian prison: the inquisition. A paper was handed in to him, with a long string of questions, which he was ordered to answer in his own handwriting, on the relations of the Rising with foreign powers, the sources of its finances, and so on. It also contained a close catechetical scrutiny upon the conversations he had held with specified persons at such and such a date, and on the ins and outs of different incidents during the insurrection, that was a severe tax on the memory of a wounded man. All that is positively known of the inquisition are the questions and Kościuszko's replies. What lay beneath it—what were the means of moral torture wielded by those who conducted the inquiry, the pitfalls spread for a prisoner who lay helpless, racked by pain from the wound in his head; what was the ingenuity employed to wrest his answers from him, whether he willed or no, are equally well known, says Kościuszko's historian, Korzon, who had himself more than sixty years later languished in a Russian dungeon, to those acquainted with the methods of the Russian political prison. That Kościuszko, being at the mercy of the enemy who interrogated him, spoke as openly as he did regarding the measures that he was prepared to take with France and Turkey against Russia, is eloquent, says the same historian, of the force of his character land of his conquest over physical infirmity.[1] His answers are short and pithily clear. He speaks the truth, says another Pole, or he does not speak at all.[1]
[1] T. Korzon, Kościuszko.
[1] Op. cit.
His high qualities began to gain upon his conquerors. At the outset Catherine II in her correspondence speaks contemptuously of him as "a fool in all the meaning of that word"; but presently her language changes to a more complimentary, if still patronizing, tone, and after some months she had him removed from the fortress and conveyed to the Orlov palace, as a place more suited to his physically shattered condition. He was allowed to be carried into the garden and to take drives in the town under guard. He was provided with a good table, from which he daily sent meals to the Polish prisoners in the fortress. Always deft with his fingers, he whiled away the hours by working at a turning-lathe. A wooden sugar-basin that he made during his imprisonment is now in the Polish Museum at Rapperswil, Switzerland.
All this time he lay sick and crippled. The wounds he had carried from Maciejowice, unskilfully tended by the Russian surgeons, remained unhealed: grief of mind for his country did the rest. An English doctor named Rogerson attended him. He wrote: "The physical and mental forces of that upright man are nearly exhausted, as the result of long sufferings. I am losing hopes of curing him. He has suffered so much in body and soul that his organism is entirely destroyed."[2]