However it may have been, an instantaneous fire was opened. While some squadrons of cavalry received orders to charge, fifteen volleys from the infantry made many bloody openings in the mass of defenceless beings, who now found themselves hemmed in on every side. While being cut down, the crowd continued to kneel, and to pray. The women and the children were grouped together on their knees round an image of the Virgin, at the extreme end of the square, and there the people remained till late into the night; so late that the troops had been previously drawn off the ground. It is certain that more than fifty persons had perished, and that the number of the wounded was immense; but darkness has always been allowed to hang over the numbers who fell on that night. An eye witness wrote with emotion: ‘Never shall I be able to make you understand this unparalleled contempt of death, which is so enthusiastic that it animates men, women, and children. Old soldiers, accustomed to being under fire, assure me that never, when so close, have the most solid troops preserved a heroism as calm and invincible as this crowd has displayed when furiously charged by cavalry and under fire.’
It was, indeed, a strange insurrection. The authorities in Warsaw had no difficulty in quelling it; but it rendered every future transaction more difficult, for it had placed between Russia and Poland a barrier of invincible suspicion. It was a misfortune for Russia, that, while gaining these melancholy victories, she added nothing to the security of her rule, and she certainly added nothing to her strength. Her difficulties were, however, greatly increased by them, and she remained weighed down by the weight of her own policy. It is true, indeed, that even after the 8th of April she maintained the reforms which she had already promulgated; but the logic of her situation was, that she was at war with the most intangible thing in the world, with the soul of a nation. Russia could not lay her finger upon any conspiracy, but not the less did everything seem to threaten her, and she was constantly obliged to invent new plans for putting down she hardly knew what. At night no one was to go out without a lantern, and it was forbidden to be seen walking in certain localities. Against wearing mourning the rules were peculiarly stringent. Indeed, at one moment it was necessary to have permission from the police to wear black. Yet the genius of the police was at fault, and it was baffled by the provoking obstinacy in favour of universal mourning, and of the black dresses which the Polish ladies had adopted.
To do the Russian authorities justice, they did not feel their consciences at ease in the matter of this war. Even when using repressive measures they seemed to be agitated by a secret disquiet—a feeling which declared itself in a very striking manner during the last days of Prince Gortchakof, whom death overtook in the middle of this conflict, only two months after the scene of the 8th of April. It would seem almost as though the tragedies of Poland had something fatal in them to the Russian officials. Already, they tell us, that Prince Paskievitch, when on his death-bed, had been troubled by a sinister apparition; for everywhere before him rose a shade, that of the mother of Count Zawisza, who had lain at his feet to implore pardon for her son, and who had implored it in vain. The last moments of Prince Gortchakof were disturbed in the same way. In Warsaw it was said, that ever after the bloody scenes of February and of April he had been vexed by sudden hallucinations, as well as by fits of gloomy irritation. A few days before his death, he went to the railway-station to meet his wife, Princess Gortchakof, who was to arrive from a journey. He saw one of the principal bankers of Warsaw, and, running up to him, he began: ‘Oh, you there! so you play the patriot, do you? But I know how to crush you! I shall soon make an end of your d——d students! I will make dust of you!’ During the last days of his life, he fancied that he constantly saw women in black, who followed him, or walked beside him. ‘Oh, the women in black! oh, the women in black! send them away,’ he would cry. If such were the sufferings of the Prince, there were to be others who, as we shall see, came to a yet more terrible end. The same secret trouble was betrayed by the words of General Souchozanett, the immediate successor of Prince Gortchakof, when, before leaving Warsaw, he said: ‘You may accuse me of being an unsuccessful blunderer; but you cannot say that I am a cruel man, for I have never fired upon a single creature.’ There was a strange fatality about this system, for it weighed upon those who carried it out, as well as upon those who were its victims; and such as it was, after the 8th of April, it stood complete, before the eyes of an angry and seething populace.
Throughout these events, one man made a great effort to procure a reconciliation. His figure is not the least original, or the least characteristic of those who meet in this drama, and I have already named him, for he is the Marquis Wiélopolski. Ever since the 1st of April, 1861, he had taken a preponderant place in the Councils of the Government, and, no doubt, his part is not yet played out. During February, as I have already said, the Marquis Wiélopolski resided in Warsaw; and he suggested that an address should be sent to the Emperor, wherein a constitution was to be demanded, but which should open with an act of submission, and with a testimony of their contrition; for it was to disallow, in some measure, the Revolution of 1830. Not having been able to make good this idea, he refused to sign the address that was sent to St. Petersburg, and held himself aloof from the movement. Very shortly after, the Emperor called him to the Direction of Public Education, and from that time he took a decisive part in all the measures that followed. Before long, and by the dismissal of the other directors, which was consequent upon the 8th of April, the Marquis Wiélopolski found himself alone in the Council, and associated with all its most rigorous proceedings. He is, perhaps, one of the most curious types of our times, for he is a proud, contemptuous, eloquent man, a scion of the family of the Gonzagas; and for this reason, perhaps, he exhibits, at times, traces of the old Italian policy. He is a great landed proprietor, and, by his different estates, is connected with all the provinces of Poland; and he is devoted to Russia, not by servility or interest, but by a passion of revenge which he nourishes against the West; and his system is the result of calculation, and of a line of policy which is powerful, although strange. In 1846, after the massacres in Galicia, the Marquis Wiélopolski wrote that ‘Letter to Prince Metternich, by a Polish Gentleman,’ which rang with such fiery eloquence, and which being, as it were, a new revelation, echoed throughout Europe. The author there advised Poland to embrace a resolution of heroic despair—to renounce, for the future, all help from the Western Powers, all deceitful and calculating sympathy, all cheap eloquence, all those guarantees which men have decorated with the pompous title of ‘rights of peoples,’ and then boldly to give herself to Russia. ‘Go to the Tzar, and say to him: We come to you, as to the most generous of our foes; hitherto, we have belonged to you, as slaves, by right of conquest, and from terror; to-day, we come to you as free men, who have the courage to acknowledge that they have been conquered.... We do not stipulate with you about conditions—to yourself we leave it to judge when you may relax towards us the severity of your law. We make no reserve; but in our hearts, in letters of fire, you will read our silent prayer, this single petition, “Do not leave unpunished the crimes which strangers have committed; and in the blood of our brethren which has been shed, hear the Slave blood, which cries for vengeance” ...’
In words like these, one can recognise a theorist, who is inflamed with panslavism, and whose revenge anticipates the day, when by this fusion, this sacrifice of the idea of national independence, this moral suicide, the Polish race may revive in the Empire, and again, through their intelligence, find an ascendency in the Council.
What the Marquis Wiélopolski had thought in 1846 he still thought in 1861; and he therefore kept himself apart from all attempts to warm up the thought of nationality, as also from all the practical labours which were to bring about a patient and invisible reorganisation of his country; and he never would become a member of the Agricultural Society.
The Marquis now entered on his official career distinguished by all the inflexible vigour of a character which was lofty and proud enough to brave unpopularity among his countrymen; and, while he consented to serve Russia, he did not the less preserve a haughty attitude towards her. In the month of February, while agitating for the adoption of his proposed address, he got a message from Prince Gortchakof, warning him to take care of what he was about; he proudly replied, ‘Tell the Prince that my boxes are filled, and that I am quite ready to start for Siberia.’ To his compatriots he would say, ‘You are not at the height necessary for understanding me.’ To the Russians he certainly appeared an enigma; for they could not comprehend this Polish gentleman, who, while a nobody in the ranks of the administration, suddenly became a minister, who refused all interposition, and who treated directly with the Emperor. What could such a man mean? What was the clue to his thoughts? But it can be believed how, between Poles and Russians, he occupied a solitary and difficult post; for the first had the greatest antipathy to his ideas, and the second looked upon him as a phenomenon rather more extraordinary than consolatory.
That it was possible to organise a lawful régime, the Marquis firmly believed. For the present he had no doubt of it, and he directed all his efforts to this end. But there is nothing that Russians understand so little as proceeding according to law; and, upon the death of Prince Gortchakof, this prepossession of the Marquis proved the origin of those quarrels with the new Lieutenant-General Souchozanett, in which the Polish gentleman was apt to have the better of the Russian, although he also was soon to be carried away by the current of a still more violent reaction.
This reaction was the system which Russia adopted, and which she followed, without ever perceiving that, instead of calming and mastering the movement, every instance of repression so added to its energy and depth, that when, three months later, the wishes of the government seemed to incline to a more conciliatory method, the movement was then found to have gained head greatly.
Above all, it was found to have spread, and to have reached the provinces which formed the ancient Poland of 1772. Scenes similar to those of Warsaw were enacted at Wilna; and, by the application of a uniform plan of repression, Russia, by her own acts, set a seal upon that unity of the old Polish fatherland which it was her object to abolish.