"In this wise attach a people, deceived by the fanaticism of Russia, to our country. They will be more devoted to their fellow-countrymen when they see that the latter treat with them like brothers ... and that they open to them the entrance, as to common fellow-citizens, to the highest offices. Assure all the Oriental Greeks in my name that they shall have in common with us every liberty which freedom gives men to enjoy, and that their episcopate with all its authority according to the laws of the Constitutional Diet shall be restored to them. Let them use all the influence they may have on the people of their religion to convince them that we, who are fighting for liberty, desire to make all the inhabitants of our land happy."[1]

He wrote to the clergy of the Ruthenian Greek Orthodox rite, laying emphasis on the persecution that their faith had suffered from Russia and on the liberty that Poland promised them. "Fear not that the difference of opinion and rite will hinder our loving you as brothers and fellow-countrymen. ... Let Poland recognize in your devotion her faithful sons. Thus you have the road open before you to your happiness and that of your descendants."[2]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: Op. cit.]

Following all these enactments of Kosciuszko's there ensued a curious interchange of communications between him and the King of Poland. Stanislas Augustus, under the apprehension that he was to follow Louis XVI to the scaffold, wrote to Kosciuszko, placing the continuance of such shreds of Royal power as he possessed at the dictator's arbitration. Once again Kosciuszko was called to measure swords with his King and sometime patron. This time it was Kosciuszko who was in the commanding position. His sovereign was more or less at his mercy. What his opinion of the man was is clear from the scathing indictment which his sense of outrage at the betrayal of his country tore from his lips as he wrote the history of the Ukraine campaign that Stanislas Augustus had brought to ruin. Yet this was how he answered, at the moment when his power was supreme, in a letter dated May 20, 1794:

"My Lord King,

"Just when I was engrossed in the midst of so many other labours with the drawing up of the organization of the Supreme Council, I received a communication from Your Royal Majesty under the date of the 5th instant. Having read therein that Your Royal Majesty only desires authority and importance when and inasmuch as I decide this with the nation, as regards my opinion, I frankly confess that, entertaining a loyal respect for the throne, I hold the person of Your Royal Majesty excepted from the power conferred upon me of nominating personages to the Supreme Council. As to the nation, the conduct of Your Royal Majesty in the course of the present Rising, the restored public confidence in Your Royal Majesty that was weakened by the Confederation of Targowica, the constancy with which Your Royal Majesty declares that, albeit at the cost of great personal misfortune, you will not forsake the country and nation, will contribute, I doubt not, to the securing for Your Royal Majesty of the authority in the Diet that will be most agreeable to the welfare of the country. I have written separately to the Supreme Council upon the duty of imparting to Your Royal Majesty an account of its chief actions, and this in the conviction that Your Royal Majesty will not only be a source of enlightenment to it, but of assistance inasmuch as circumstances permit. Likewise the needs of Your Royal Majesty which you mention at the end of your letter I have recommended to the attention and care of the Supreme Council. Thanking Your Royal Majesty for your good wishes concerning my person, I declare that the prosperity of Your Royal Majesty is not separated in my heart and mind from the prosperity of the country, and I assure Your Royal Majesty of my deep respect."[1]

Until the month of May Kosciuszko had been governing single-handed. He had drawn up the decrees that were of such moment to his country in the primitive conditions of a camp in a soldier's tent, with the collaboration of only his council of three friends, Kollontaj, Ignacy Potocki, and Wejssenhof. Throughout his sole dictatorship he had combined a scrupulous respect for existing laws with a firm declaration of those reforms which must be carried out without delay, if Poland were to win in her struggle for freedom. No trace of Jacobinism is to be met with in Kosciuszko's government. Defending himself with a hint of wounded feeling against some reproach apparently addressed to him by his old friend, Princess Czartoryska:

"How far you are as yet from knowing my heart!" he answers. "How you wrong my feelings and manner of thinking, and how little you credit me with foresight and attachment to our country, if I could avail myself of such impossible and such injurious measures! My decrees and actions up to now might convince you. Men may blacken me and our Rising, but God sees that we are not beginning a French revolution. My desire is to destro the enemy. I am making some temporary dispositions, and I leave the framing of laws to the nation."[2]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: Op. cit.]

The whole country was now rallying round Kosciuszko. Polish magnates, whose ancestors had been heads of armies in the old chivalrous days of the Republic of Poland, who had themselves led soldiers in the field, came to him, begging to serve in the lowest ranks if so be they might serve under him. The King's nephew, Prince Jozef Poniatowski, under whose command two years ago Kosciuszko had fought as a subordinate officer, now placed himself unreservedly at Kosciuszko's disposal. The King, the nation, were in Kosciuszko's hands. Yet he remained always the simple Lithuanian soldier, who wore the garb of the peasants, who lived familiarly with the peasants in his army, treating them as his brothers. His letters to his officers are couched in the affectionate and intimate terms of an equal friendship, reading as though from comrade to comrade. "Dear comrade," is, in fact, the title by which he addresses them when giving them his instructions. Instead of orders and decorations, of which he had none at his disposal, he offered them snuff-boxes, watches, rings—"I have sent you a ring of cat's-eyes that at night it may light you on your journey," he writes to Mokronowski—or trifles made by the hands of Polish ladies, accompanied with a few graceful words spoken from the heart that gave the gift its value. He is ever eager to bring to public notice the name of any Pole who had done well by the country; always silent on his own deeds, turning off the praises and thanks of his people to the whole nation or to individuals. The style of his commands bears an invariable hallmark of simplicity. "I conjure and entreat you for the love of our country," is their usual wording. One word, indeed, rings with unwearied reiteration through Kosciuszko's public manifestos, in his private correspondence: the love of country: It is not he who cries to the sons of Poland to save her; it is Poland herself, and he voices her call, of which he considered himself but the mouthpiece, with a touch of personal warmth for those to whom he spoke, which they requited with a passionate love.

"Dear comrade," he writes in the first weeks of war to one of his deputies, "those who have begun the Rising are in this determination: either to die for our country or to deliver her from oppression and slavery. I am certain that to your soul, your courage, I need say no more. Poland will certainly touch your sensitive heart, dear comrade."[1]

[Footnote 1: Letters of Kosciuszko.]

The same tone is conspicuous in Kosciuszko's many proclamations to the nation. In these, too, he addresses the people of whose destinies he was the ruler, who were under his obedience, as his "dear comrades," his "fellow-citizens," his "brothers." He regarded himself in no other light than that of: the servant of his country, equally ready to command or to resign his authority, according as her interests demanded. Lust of power and personal ambition were unknown to him. He was, if we may use the expression, out for one object: to save his country; and any interest of his own was in his scheme nonexistent. "Let no man who prizes virtue," he wrote, "desire power. They have laid it in my hands at this critical moment. I know not if I have merited this confidence, but I do know that for me this power is only a weapon for the effectual defence of my country, and I confess that I long for its termination as sincerely as for the salvation of the nation."[1] He yearned not for the sword, but for peace and the "little garden" of his dreams, as he tells a friend. Given that temper of his mind and the inherent nobility of his nature, and we have the explanation how it is that not one unworthy deed, not a single moral stain, disfigures the seven months that Kosciuszko stood at the head of the Polish state, beset though he was by internal and external problems under which a man of less purity of aim and single-heartedness than his might well have swerved.

But for all his native modesty Kosciuszko was too conscious of his obligation to his country to brook any infringement of the power he held. Writing a sharp rebuke to "the whole principality of Lithuania and especially to the Provisional Council of Wilno," which he had reason to believe was arrogating to itself his functions, he declares that he would be "unworthy of the trust" that his nation had confided to him if he did not "know how to use and maintain" his authority.[2] A little later, desirous to mitigate this sternness with the suavity more congenial to him, he spoke to his native district in a different key.

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: K. Bartoszewicz, History of Kosciuszko's Insurrection.]

"The last moment of Poland, her supreme cause, salvation or eternal ruin and shame, personal freedom and national independence, or a terrible slavery and the groaning of millions of men ... the destruction of the Polish name, or her glorious place in the ranks of nations: these are the considerations that must take hold of the Polish nation, of you, citizens of Lithuania. ... Poles, now is the moment for the amendment of eternal errors. Now is the time to be worthy of your ancestors, to forget yourselves in order to save the country, to stifle in yourselves the base voice of personal interest in order to serve the public. Now must you draw forth your last strength, your last means, to give freedom to your land. ... Let us know how to die! And what is earthly life? A transitory and passing shadow, subject to a thousand accidents. What Pole can live, if he must live in the state in which till now, with his compatriots, he has been compelled to live? ... Oh, fellow-countrymen! If you spare your lives, it is that you should be wretched slaves; if you spare your possessions, it is that they should be the spoils of the invaders. Who can be so deprived of reason or so fearful, as to doubt that we shall surely conquer, if we all manfully desire to conquer?

"Lithuania! My fellow-countrymen and compatriots! I was born on your soil, and in the midst of righteous zeal for my country more especial affection is called forth in me for those among whom I began life. ... Look at the rest of the nation of which you are a part. Look at those volunteers, already assembling in each province of all the Crown, seeking out the enemy, leaving homes and families for a beloved country, inflamed with the watchword of those fighting for the nation: Death or Victory! Once again, I say, we shall conquer! Earlier or later the powerful God humbles the pride of the invaders, and aids persecuted nations, faithful to Him and faithful to the virtue of patriotism."[1]

[Footnote 1: K. Bartoszewicz, Op. cit. Kosciuszko. Periodical Publication.]

The moment had now arrived—in the May of 1794—to regularize the Rising and to establish the temporary government on a stable and more conventional basis. Kosciuszko explained himself fully in his proclamation of May 21st to the "citizens of Poland and Lithuania":

"It has pleased you, citizens, to give me the highest proof of confidence, for you have not only laid your whole armed strength and the use thereof in my hands, but in addition, in the period of the Rising, not deeming yourselves to be in the condition to make a well-ordered choice of members for the Supreme National Council, you confided that choice to me. The greater the universal confidence in me that I behold, the more solicitous I am to respond to it agreeably to your wishes and to the necessities of the nation.

"I kept to that consideration in the nomination of members of the Council. I desired to make the same choice that you yourselves would have made. So I looked for citizens who were worthy of the public trust: I considered who in private and public life had maintained the obligations of unstained virtue, who were steadfastly attached to the Rights of the Nation and the Rights of the People, who at the time of the nation's misfortunes, when foreign oppression and domestic crime drove at their will the fate of the country, had most suffered for their patriotism and their merits. It was such men whom for the most part I summoned to the National Council, joining to them persons honoured for their knowledge and virtue, and adding to them deputies capable of assisting them in their onerous obligations."

He then says that the reason he did not nominate the Council earlier was because he was awaiting the whole nation's confirmation of the Act of the Rising that had been proclaimed in Cracow, and thus "during the first and violent necessities" of the Rising he was driven to issue manifestos and ordinances on his own responsibility.

"With joy I see the time approaching when nothing shall be able to justify me for the smallest infringement of the limits you placed to my power. I respect them because they are just, because they emanate from your will, which is the most sacred law for me. I hope that not only now, but when—God grant it!—having delivered our country from her enemies, I cast my sword under the feet of the nation, no one shall accuse me of their transgression."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

Public morality did not satisfy Kosciuszko in his choice of the men who were to rule the country. He would have none to shape her laws and destinies whose personal morals were lax. "What do you want, Prince?" were the dry words with which he greeted Jozef Poniatowski, when the gay officer came into his camp to offer his sword to the Rising; and it is said that this ungracious reception, widely different from Kosciuszko's usual address, was due to the fact that he, whose own private life was blameless, was of too Puritan a temper to be able to overlook certain notorious aspects of Poniatowski's character.

Still in May Kosciuszko sent Kollontaj and Ignacy Potocki to Warsaw, and the National Council assumed there its legal functions. Among its members sat not only Kollontaj, Potocki, and those who had taken part in the old Polish Diet, former ministers of state and high officers, two representatives of the clergy of the Latin and Greek rites, but the banker Kapostas, who had been the originator of the secret confederation that had prepared the Rising in Warsaw and who had only narrowly escaped Russian imprisonment, and the shoemaker Kilinski. Thus for the first time in Polish history artisans and burghers were included in the national governing body. The assembly was animated by that new spirit of democracy in its noblest form in which Kosciuszko himself was steeped. It carried forward the task that the Constitution of the 3rd of May had begun and had been forced by Poland's conquerors to abandon. Its presidency passed by rotation to each member, who called each other "citizen," and who were all, without distinction of rank and class, treated as equals. They organized the Ministry into the ordinary departments, and entered into relations with foreign powers, among which England, Sweden, and Austria—the latter soon to change her face—acknowledged them as the lawful government of state.

Having thus lightened the burden of civil rule by securing effective colleagues, Kosciuszko, although he did not cease to be the chief dictator of the nation, could now more freely devote himself to the immediate object of the Rising.



CHAPTER VII

THE RISING OF KOSCIUSZKO

II

We have reached the month of May, 1794. Kosciuszko and the Russian army under Denisov were now at close grips, Denisov repeatedly attacking, Kosciuszko beating him off. Communications with Warsaw and all the country were impeded. Provisions were almost impossible to procure. Kosciuszko'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 Kosciuszko's camp to tell him their piteous stories. Then Denisov retreated so swiftly towards the Prussian frontier that Kosciuszko, 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—Kosciuszko had by the end of May gathered together. From Kiev, under the very eyes of the Russian troops in the town. Kopec—who for his share in the national war later underwent exile in the penal settlements of Kamchatka—led a band of Polish soldiers to Kosciuszko'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. Kopec 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 Kopec, 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 Kosciuszko.

We have seen that Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko'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]

[Page 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

The name of Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 Raclawice and on the battles in which Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko "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. Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko's one, carried the day against the Poles. Kosciuszko'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.

[Footnote 1: Kosciuszko. Periodical Publication.]

There was no choice left open to Kosciuszko, 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko'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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

A peasant war could at the moment be only a chimera, impossible of realization. Does this manifesto prove that Kosciuszko, in a most perilous situation, abandoned by Europe, was pushed to a measure that he himself knew was a desperate hope? Or was it the generous prompting of a great dream that beats down, that refuses to be disconcerted by the obstacles that stand before it—that in its failure we call visionary, but in its success the reform for which the world has waited? Be that as it may, the proclamation was not without its response. The Supreme Council modified its wording, and sent it into Great Poland—the so-called "Prussian" Poland—with the result that the Poles there took up arms.

A lion striving in the toils:—such is the simile by which a Polish historian describes the position of Kosciuszko. Not one word or sign of sympathy for his nation in her gallant struggle for life reached him from any quarter outside his country. Nor was he beset only by external obstacles. Difficulties inside the state added to his cares. In answer to the complaint of a deputation from Warsaw, dissatisfied with the composition of the Supreme Council, he wrote from his tent, begging the people of the city, his "brothers and fellow-citizens," to remember that he, whom their delegates "saw," as he expresses it, "serving you and the country in the sweat of my brow," had only the happiness of the sons of Poland at heart. May, says he, his "vow made before God and the world calm all the anxieties of each citizen and defend them from irregular steps against the established Council. ... My answer is short: let us first drive out the enemy, and then we will lay down the unchangeable foundations of our happiness."[1]

Sincerity was the groundwork of Kosciuszko's dealings with his people. The greater the reverses which the cause of Poland encountered, the greater must be the courage with which to conquer them. Defeat must be regarded merely as the incentive to victory. Thus, a few days after the battle of Szczekociny, giving the nation a full report of the battle, in which he mitigated none of his losses, he ended with these words:

"Nation! This is the first test of the stability of thy spirit, the first day of thy Rising in which it is free to thee to be sad, but not to be dismayed. Those guilty of thy defeat will amend it at the first opportunity, and they who have never deceived thee as to their courage thirst to avenge thy misfortune of a moment. Wouldest thou be worthy of liberty and self-government if thou knowest not how to endure the vicissitudes of fate? Nation! Thy soil shall be free. Only let thy spirit be high above all."[2]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: K. Bartoszewicz, History of Kosciuszko's Insurrection.]

He then marched in haste towards Warsaw, whose safety was threatened. On the way tidings of a great disaster were brought to him—that of the capitulation of Cracow to the Prussians by its Polish commander, the national honour only redeemed by the gallant attempt of the Cracow burghers led by a book-keeper to defend the castle, to whom the Prussian general gave the honours of war as they marched out. The knowledge that the Prussians were in possession of the ancient capital of Poland, the most beloved of Polish cities, which had rung with the first vows of the national uprising, must have been bitter beyond expression to Kosciuszko and to all Poland; but again he would permit neither himself nor his nation to meet this blow with anything but unshaken fortitude.

"We have sustained a loss "—thus his manifesto: "but I ask of courageous and stable souls, ought this to make us fear? Can the loss of one town bid us despair of the fate of the whole commonwealth? The first virtue of a free man is not to despair of the fate of his country." He speaks of Athens and the Persians, Rome after Cannae, France driving the English out of their country, and the heroes of his own nation who had repulsed Sweden, Turkey, Russia, and the Tartars. "Other men of courage and of virtue have not doubted. Instead of breaking into profitless lamentations they flew to arms, and delivered the country from the invasions of their enemies. ... I have told you, citizens, what my duty bade me tell you in the conditions of to-day: beware of indirect and alarmist impressions, beware of those who spread them. Trust in the valour of our armies and the fidelity of their leaders. ... Let not Europe say: 'The Pole is swift to enthusiasm, swifter to discouragement.' Rather let the nations say: 'The Poles are valiant in resolution, unterrified in disaster, constant in fulfilment.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: op. cit.]

As if to prove the truth of his words, good news poured in from Lithuania, Samogitia, Courland. Bands of peasants were fighting in Lithuania. The Rising was general in Samogitia. Courland remembered that in the past she had been a member of the Polish Commonwealth, and her citizens gave in their act of adhesion to the Polish Rising.

Taking advantage of Frederick William's incapacity of profiting by his victory at Szczekociny, Kosciuszko pushed rapidly on to Warsaw. By a series of skilful manoeuvres, in the last days of June he arrived outside the city, and prepared to defend her at all costs.

Events then occurred in Warsaw of a nature to arouse his strong condemnation. Hearing of the loss of Cracow at the hand of a traitor, the Warsaw populace, with the memory of Targowica, many of whose confederates were still in their midst, staring them in the face, dragged out from the prisons certain Poles who had either been guilty or who were suspected of treason, and executed them then and there. Kosciuszko was in camp in the neighbourhood of Warsaw. Any form of terrorism was abhorrent both to his private and national conscience. So deeply did he take to heart this outbreak of popular fury that one of his Lithuanian commanders, Prince Michal Oginski, who visited him at that time, heard him declare that he would have preferred the loss of two battles as being less prejudicial to the Polish cause. As the head of the national government, he at once addressed the following letter to the city of Warsaw:—

"While all my labours and efforts are strained to the expulsion of the enemy, the news has reached me that an enemy more terrible than a foreign army is threatening us and tearing our vitals asunder. What happened in Warsaw yesterday has filled my heart with bitterness and sadness. The wish to punish delinquents was well, but why were they punished without the sentence of a tribunal? Why have you outraged the authority and sanctity of the laws? Is that the act of a people which has raised its sword and conquered foreign invaders in order to restore a well-ordered liberty and the rule of law, and the tranquil happiness that flow therefrom?"

Warning them in impassioned accents that such conduct was the surest means of playing into the hands of the enemy whose desire was to promote public confusion and thus impede the national work:

"As soon as the turn of war permits me to absent myself for a moment from the duties entrusted to me, I shall be among you. Perhaps the sight of a soldier who daily risks his life for you will be agreeable to you; but I would that no sadness imprinted on my countenance shall mar that moment. I would that our joy shall then be full, both yours and mine. I would that the sight of me shall remind you that the defence of freedom and of our country should only knit and unite us together, that only in unity can we be strong, that by justice, not by violence, shall we be safe at home and respected in the world. Citizens! I conjure you for the sake of the nation and of yourselves wipe out a moment of madness by unison, by courage against the common enemies and by a henceforth constant respect of the laws and of those who are appointed in the name of the law. Know this, that he who refuses to be submissive to the law is not worthy of freedom."

He blames the Council of State for not having brought the prisoners to trial before, and bids this be done immediately.

"And thus fulfilling what public justice exacts, I from henceforth most severely forbid the people, for their welfare and salvation, all lawless riots, violence against the prisoners, laying hands on individuals, and punishing them by death. Whoso does not betake himself to the government by the proper way is a rebel, a disturber of the public peace, and as such must be punished. You whose ardent courage is fain to take action for the country, employ it against the enemies, come to my camp; we will receive you here as brothers."[1]

Many responded to this call, Kilinski, the shoemaker, with the cap of liberty planted rakishly on his head, as we may see him in his portraits, went to Kosciuszko with the proposal that he should "catch" the lower classes of the town. Kosciuszko gave his hearty consent, and a regiment of these was formed with Kilinski as their colonel. Kosciuszko was always singularly happy in his dealings with men and with the extraordinarily involved and delicate situations in which the domestic affairs of his country at this difficult period of her history placed him. His tact and common sense saved the situation. The guilty were punished. Order was restored.

The Russian and Prussian armies were advancing to invest Warsaw. At Kosciuszko's bidding the President of the town, Zakrzewski, whom Kosciuszko addresses as his "beloved" Zakrzewski, had already in stirring language summoned the citizens to take their share in Warsaw's defence.

[Footnote 1: K. Bartoszewicz, History of Kosciuszko's Insurrection.]

"Old men and young men, mothers and children, masters and servants, convents and confraternities, and all, in whatsoever you have of strength and health, present yourselves on the ramparts of the city with spades, shovels, barrows, baskets. You who are rich forget your comforts. You who are highborn forget your rank. Stand with the poor and hard-working citizens so that you who have drawn life from one soil shall on one soil taste the fruits of your safety, liberties, and possessions."[1]

[Footnote 1: A. Choloniewski, Tadeusz Kosciuszko.]

Crowds toiled on the ramparts, singing over their spades the song then sung throughout Poland, calling the Pole to the labour without which he would be torn from his brothers, "a prisoner on his own soil." The sons of noble families enrolled themselves in Kilinski's burgher regiment, eager to serve under his command. On the 13th of July the Russian and Prussian armies, the King of Prussia being present with the latter, were seen from the walls of Warsaw. The alarm was given and the cannon fired from the castle. The citizens took up their places in the entrenchments with an order and a precision that won high praise from Kosciuszko as he went his round of inspection. With undisturbed equanimity Kosciuszko prepared with his body of 26,000 men, of whom 16,000 were regulars, the rest peasants armed with scythes, to defend Warsaw against 41,000 Russians and Prussians and 235 cannon. Despite the labour of the townsfolk, the defences of the city were weak and incomplete when the enemy first appeared; but during the fortnight while the hostile armies lay encamped before Warsaw, waiting for their heavy cannon, Kosciuszko, by dint of his great gift of organization, put the fortifications into strong working order.

"His creative power," said of him one of his adversaries, a Prussian officer, who took part in the siege, "is worthy of admiration, since he alone, in the midst of creating an army, fought with it against the two best armies of Europe, having neither their stores nor their discipline. What would he not have shown himself at the head of a good army, since he did so much with peasants who knew nothing? Equally great in character, in devotion, in love of his country, he lived exclusively for her freedom and independence."[1]

[Footnote 1: A. Choloniewski, Tadeusz Kosciuszko.]

The story would be long to tell, of how the Poles, peasants, burghers and soldiers alike, with the inheritance of the fighting blood that runs in the veins of every son of Poland, with the fire of patriotism and of measureless devotion to the chief who led them, fought day after day the besieging army till it was beaten. The diary of the siege is the daily record of deeds of gallantry, of steadfastness, of a few carrying off the honours against many. Nor is there wanting a touch of that wild and romantic spirit of knightly adventure which runs all through the history of a country that for centuries defended Christendom against Turk and Tartar. Thus we find a Polish officer, Kamienski, who had already crowned himself with glory at Szczekociny, choosing to celebrate his name-day by inviting his friends to come with him and stir up the Russians, hitherto entirely passive in the operations of the siege. This, so to speak, birthday party was swelled by a band of eager Polish youths and by General Madalinski, who hastened to offer himself as a volunteer. They attacked a Russian battery, spiked the cannon and cut the gunners to pieces. Again and again Dombrowski, who was later to lead the Polish Napoleonic legions, and whose name stands at the head of the famous patriotic song so beloved of Poland, would at Kosciuszko's laconic order, "Harass the enemy," sally forth on some daring expedition. Or we hear of a sixteen hours' battle, the Poles, under a terrific fire, successfully driving the Prussians from height to height, Kosciuszko himself commanding Kilinski's burgher regiment. No shirkers were to be found in Warsaw. Under the fearful Prussian bombardment the citizens coolly put out the fires, and the children ran into the streets to pick up the spent balls and take them to the arsenal, receiving a few pence for each one that they brought in. Once as Kosciuszko and Niemcewicz stood on the ramparts with cannon-balls pattering about them, Niemcewicz heard a voice shouting into his ear through the din: "You are coming to supper with me, aren't you?"[1] The host who had the presence of mind to arrange a party under these circumstances was the President of Warsaw.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, Recollections of My Times.]

Even those who will not allow that Kosciuszko was a military commander of the first capacity acknowledge that the defence of Warsaw was a magnificent feat. He was its life and soul. Organizing, encouraging, seeing into the closest details, the somewhat small but strongly built figure of the commander, clad in the peasant sukman worn, after his example, by all his staff, including the "citizen General Poniatowski," was to be met with at every turn, his face lit up by that fire of enthusiasm and consecration to a great cause that confers upon its rough lineaments their strange nobility. From the 13th of July till the 6th of September, when the enemy abandoned the siege, Kosciuszko never once took off his clothes, merely flinging himself on a little heap of straw in his tent on his return from his rounds to catch what sleep he could. His very presence inspired soldiers and civilians alike to redoubled ardour. The sweetness of his smile, the gentle and kindly word of the leader who yet knew how to be obeyed and who was famed for his courage in the field, left a memory for life with all who saw him. Passionate admiration, the undying love of men's hearts, were his. "Death or Victory is Kosciuszko's watchword, therefore it is ours," said a Polish officer who served under him. "Father Tadeusz" was the name by which his soldiers called him. Invariably he spent some part of his day among his beloved peasants, and daily he recited with them public prayers. Often at night he and they together went up to the teeth of the Russian batteries on expeditions to spike the cannon. His inseparable companion, Niemcewicz, who slept with him in his tent till the-end came, describes how the silence of these nights was broken hideously by the wild, shrill cry of the reapers, by the sudden roar of the cannon and crack of gunfire, by the groans of the wounded.

The defence of Warsaw was but half of the task that fell to Kosciuszko. The minutest particulars were dealt with by him personally. He wrote letter after letter, commandeering everything in the country for the national cause: requisitioning linen from the churches to clothe his soldiers, who in the beginning of the siege were half naked, sending out his directions to the leaders of the Rising in the provinces, issuing proclamations, maintaining an enormous correspondence on affairs—it is said that the number of letters from his pen or signed by him at this time is almost incredible—giving audiences, and conducting the civil government of Poland.

Early in August the Prussian general, in a letter to Orlowski, Kosciuszko's old friend, whom he had made commandant of Warsaw, summoned the city to surrender, while the King of Prussia addressed himself in similar language to Stanislas Augustus, whose part in the historical drama of the siege was that of an inert spectator. Kosciuszko drily replied, "Warsaw is not in the necessity to be compelled to surrender." The Polish King replied, not drily, to the same effect. The fortunes of the Rising in the rest of the country were fluctuating, and in Lithuania, where Wilno fell, hopeless. In the beginning of September exultation ran through Warsaw at the news that every province of Great Poland had risen against their Prussian conquerors. Kosciuszko characteristically took up the general joy as the text of a manifesto to the citizens of Warsaw, warning them that Prussia would, in the strength of desperation, redouble her efforts against them, and urging them to a dogged resistance. On the 4th of September, shortly after the Poles had by a most gallant attack carried off a signal triumph, when Warsaw was preparing for a fresh and violent bombardment, Kosciuszko wrote in haste to the President: "Beloved Zakrzewski, to-day, before daybreak, we shall certainly be attacked, and therefore I beg and conjure you for the love of our country that half of the citizens shall go to-day into the line, and that if they attack all shall go out."[1]

The attack did not take place; and on the 6th of September the Prussians retired from Warsaw. During the whole course of the siege, with the exception of one post they had taken in its earliest stage, they had gained not one inch against the Poles defending their city with smaller numbers and inferior ammunition. The Russians retreated with the Prussians. They had remained almost immovable during the siege. Neither of these two collaborators in the destruction of Poland were on the best terms with each other, and Catherine II had no mind to share with Prussia the distinction, and still less the profits, of bringing Warsaw to its knees. Austria, although she was by way of being at war with Kosciuszko, had held aloof from the siege, unwilling to commit herself, but determined on coming in for the spoils when the Rising should be crushed out.

Kosciuszko then tasted one of the greatest triumphs of his life: the armies of the enemy were no more seen round the city he had saved.

"By your assiduity, your valour," the National Council wrote to him, "you have curbed the pride and power of that foe who, after pressing upon us so threateningly, has been forced to retreat with shame upon his covetous intentions. The Council knows only too well the magnitude of the labours which you brought to the defence of this city, and therefore cannot but make known to you that most lively gratitude and esteem with which all this city is penetrated. "[2]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: Op. cit.]

Further, it expressed the wish that Kosciuszko should show himself to a grateful people in some solemn function.

To this Kosciuszko politely replied, declining to take any share in a public honour which it was against every dictate of his nature to accept.

"I have read with the greatest gratitude and emotion the flattering expressions of the Supreme National Council. I rejoice equally with every good citizen at the liberation of the city from the enemy armies. I ascribe this to nothing else but to Providence, to the valour of the Polish soldiers, to the zeal and courage of the citizens of Warsaw, to the diligence of the government. I place myself entirely at the disposition of the Supreme National Council: in what manner and when do you wish the celebration to take place? My occupations will not permit me the pleasure of being with you. I venture to trust that the God who has delivered the capital will deliver our country likewise. Then, as a citizen, not as a bearer of office, will I offer my thanks to God and share with every one the universal joy."[1]

[Footnote 1: Op. cit.]

He stayed in his camp and, in order to avoid an ovation, did not enter Warsaw. No public triumph was celebrated, but Masses of thanksgiving were sung in every church of the city.

Although he was the ruler of the state, Kosciuszko lived in the utmost simplicity. He had refused the palace that was offered to him, and took up his quarters in a tent. When receiving guests his modest meal was spread under a tree. Asked by Oginski why he drank no Burgundy, his reply was that Oginski, being a great magnate, might permit himself such luxuries, "but not the commander who is now living at the expense of an oppressed commonwealth." When taken unawares by a royal chamberlain he was discovered blowing up his own fire, preparing some frugal dish.

In the first flush of joy at the liberation of Warsaw, he wrote to Mokronowski:

"Warsaw is delivered. There are no longer either Muscovites or Prussians here: we will go and seek them out. Go, my friend, and seek them out, and deliver Lithuania from the invaders."[1]

But Kosciuszko's steadiness of outlook was not for an instant relaxed by the signal success he had won. Untiring vigilance and redoubled activity were his order of the day, both for himself and his fellow-Poles. The short breathing-space that followed the retirement of the enemy was devoted by him to the pressing internal concerns of the nation, taxation and so forth. He was determined on perfect freedom for all classes and all religions in Poland. He ordered the erection of new Orthodox places of worship for the members of the Eastern Church. He enrolled a Jewish legion to fight in Poland's army, and commanded that this regiment should be equipped and treated on equal terms with the Polish soldiers of the Republic. In a transport of gratitude the Jewish leaders called upon their fellow-believers to rise for Poland in confidence of victory under "our protector, Tadeusz Kosciuszko," who "is without doubt the emissary of the eternal and Most High God."[2]

[Footnote 1: Letters of Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: K. Falkenstein, Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Wroclaw, 1831 (Polish).]

Kosciuszko was a generous enemy. His Russian captives he treated with a courtesy and kindness that were ill repaid during his own march into Russia as a prisoner in Russian hands. He directed that services in their own language and faith should be held for the Prussian prisoners. A letter of his remains that he wrote to the Lutheran minister of the evangelical church in Warsaw, expressing his gratitude that this clergyman's pulpit had been a centre of patriotism, at a time "when nations who love freedom must win the right to their existence by streams of blood," and telling the pastor that he has issued orders for the Prussian prisoners to be taken to church in the "conviction that you will not refuse them your fatherly teaching."[1]

[Footnote 1: Tygodnik Illustrowany. Warsaw, 1881 (Polish).]

This letter and the snuff-box that accompanied it were preserved as relics in the pastor's family.

The Bohemian and Hungarian prisoners were by Kosciuszko's command released, "in memory of the bond that united the Hungarians and Czechs, when free countries, with the Polish nation." We have lived to see the descendants of that Hungarian generation spreading untold atrocities through Polish towns and villages as the tool of Prussia in the recent war.

The triumph over the Prussians was but a temporary respite. The Prussian army returned to the investment of Warsaw, at some distance from the town itself. The ambassador of the King of Prussia was treating in Petersburg with Catherine II for the third partition of Poland. She on her side sent Suvorov with a new and powerful army against the Poles. The Austrians were already in the country. Kosciuszko, fighting for life against Russia and Prussia, had no army to send against the third of his foes. His generals were engaging the enemy in different parts of Poland, at times with success, as notably Dombrowski in Great Poland, where events continued to be the one gleam of hope in these last days of the Rising, but again with terrible defeats, such as Sierakowski experienced by the army of Suvorov, near Kosciuszko's old home. Kosciuszko deceived himself with no illusions: but neither fear nor despair found an entry into his soul. "He did not lose heart," writes one who never left him. "He turned and defended himself on all sides."[1] Wherever his presence was most urgently needed, thither he repaired. Accompanied only by Niemcewicz he rode at full speed into Lithuania to rally the spirits of Mokronowski's corps, depressed by defeat. He returned at the same breakneck pace, miraculously, says his companion, escaping capture by the Cossacks who were swarming over the country. On this occasion, Princess Oginska, at whose house the travellers took a hasty dinner, pushing on immediately afterwards, gave Kosciuszko a beautiful turquoise, set with diamonds. It was to be among the Russian spoils at Maciejowice.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, Op. cit.]

The proclamation that Kosciuszko addressed to the Lithuanian soldiers, found later in his handwriting among his letters, bears its own testimony to the soul of the leader who, in the face of strong armies marching upon his doomed nation, would give no entrance to despair or discouragement. Expressing the joy he experienced at being among the soldiers of Lithuania, on whose soil he was born:

"My brothers and comrades! If till now the results of your toil and struggles have not entirely corresponded to the courage and intrepidity of a free nation, I ascribe this, not to the superior valour of our enemies (for what could there be more valiant than a Polish army?); but I ascribe it to a want of confidence in our own strength and courage, to that false and unfortunate idea of the enemy's power which some fatality has sown among your troops. Soldiers valiant and free! Beware of those erroneous conceptions that wrong you; thrust them from your hearts; they are unworthy of Poles. ... A few thousand of your ancestors were able to subdue the whole Muscovite state, to carry into bondage her Tsars and dictate to her rulers, and you, the descendants of those same Poles, can, wrestling for freedom and country, fighting for your homes, families and friends, doubt ... if you will conquer. ... Remember, I repeat, that on our united courage and steadfastness the country must depend for her safety, you for your freedom and happiness."

He threatens with the utmost rigour of martial law any who shall attempt to undermine the spirit of the army by representing the difficulty of opposing the enemy, or similar offences.

"It were a disgrace to any man to run away, but for the free man it were a disgrace even to think of flight."

"I have spoken to the cowards who, God grant, will never be found among you. Now do I speak to you, valiant soldiers, who have fulfilled the duties of courageous soldiers and virtuous citizens, who have driven the enemies even to the shores of the sea. ... I speak to those who have in so many different battles spread wide the glory of the Polish name. Accept through me the most ardent gratitude of the nation."[1]

[Footnote 1: Letters of Kosciuszko.]

In the same month, towards the end of September, he sent his country what proved to be his last message, still from his tent outside Warsaw.

"Freedom, that gift beyond estimate for man on earth, is given by God only to those nations which by their perseverance, courage, and constancy in all untoward events, are worthy of its possession. This truth is taught us by free nations which after long struggle full of labours, after protracted sufferings manfully borne, now enjoy the happy fruits of their courage and perseverance.

"Poles! You who love your country and liberty equally with the valorous nations of the south, you who have been compelled to suffer far more than others oppression and disdain; Poles, who, penetrated with the love of honour and of virtue, can endure no longer the contempt and destruction of the Polish name, who have so courageously risen against despotism and oppression, I conjure you grow not cold; do not cease in your ardour and in your constancy."

He tells them he knows only too well that in a war with the invaders their possessions are exposed to the danger of loss; "but in this perilous moment for the nation we must sacrifice all for her and, desirous to taste of lasting happiness, we must not shrink from measures, however bitter, to ensure it to ourselves. Never forget that these sufferings (if we may call such sacrifices for our country by that name!) are only passing, and that contrariwise the freedom and independence of our land prepare for you uninterrupted days of happiness."[1]

[Footnote 1: K. Falkenstein, Tadeusz Kosciuszko.]

These were the numbered days of Kosciuszko's Rising. A Russian army of highly trained troops under the able command of Suvorov was marching on Warsaw. To prevent Suvorov's juncture with the forces of the Russian general, Fersen, Kosciuszko prepared to leave Warsaw and give Fersen battle. Beset from every quarter, he had been compelled to divide his army in order to grapple with the powerful armies against him. Sierakowski had, as we have seen, been defeated. There was not a moment to be lost. On the 5th of October Kosciuszko confided to Niemcewicz that by daybreak on the following morning he intended to set out to take command of Sierakowski's detachment. He spent the evening in the house of Zakrzewski, for the last time among his dearest and most faithful collaborators, Ignacy Potocki, Kollontaj, and others. The next morning by dawn he was off with Niemcewicz. They galloped over the bridge at Praga. A month later that bridge was to run red with the blood of Polish women and children; its broken pillars were to ring with the agonizing cries of helpless fugitives as they fled from Suvorov's soldiers only to find death in the river below. The life of Poland depending on his speed, for Fersen at the head of twenty thousand men was nearing both Warsaw and Suvorov, Kosciuszko, with his companion, rode at hot haste. They only paused to change horses, remounting the miserable steeds of the peasants, sorry beasts with string for bridle and bit, and saddles without girths; but none others were to be found in a land laid waste by the Cossacks and by the marches of armed men. At four in the afternoon Kosciuszko rode into Sierakowski's camp, where he at once held a council of war. The army under his command moved on October 7th, The day was fair, glowing with the lights of the Polish autumn. The soldiers were gay of heart, and sang as they marched through villages ruined by the Cossacks—to defeat. They halted at one of these villages where the Russians had been before them. The staff spent the night in the house of the squire. The furniture had been hacked to pieces by the Cossacks, books, utensils, all destroyed. That evening a courier rode in to convey to Kosciuszko the intelligence that Dombrowski had won a victory over the Prussians at Bydgoszcz—rechristened by Prussia, Bromberg—and had taken the town. It was Kosciuszko's last hour of joy. He published the news through the camp, amidst the soldiers' acclamations, bidding them equal Dombrowski's prowess with their own. With an old friend of his Niemcewicz walked in the courtyard of the house where the staff was quartered. A flock of ravens wheeled above them. "Do you remember your Titus Livy?" asked Niemcewicz's companion. "Those ravens are on our right. It is a bad sign." "It might be so for the Romans," replied the poet, "but not for us. You will see that though it seems difficult we shall smash the Muscovites." "I think so too," answered the other.[1] In this spirit the Polish soldiers advanced to the fatal field of Maciejowice. Tents they had none. Fires were lit, around which they stood or sat, arms in hand.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, Notes sur ma Captivite a Saint-Petersbourg.]

On the 8th of October rain poured, and the wearied soldiers rested. On the 9th the army went forward. Again over that last march the strange beauty of a Polish autumn shed a parting melancholy glory. The way led through forests flaming with the red, gold, and amber with which the fall of the year paints the woods of Poland. At four o'clock the forest was left behind, and the army emerged near the village of Maciejowice. Kosciuszko, taking Niemcewicz and a few lancers, pushed on to reconnoitre the position. A scene of terrible splendour met the gaze of the doomed leader. The Vistula stretched before him, reddening in the sunset, and as far as the eye could reach lay on its shores the Russian army, their weapons flashing to the sinking sun. The hum of multitudes of men, the neighing of horses, the discordant clamours of a camp, filled the air. Advancing, Kosciuszko with his little troop had a skirmish with the Cossacks. The general and Niemcewicz were twice surrounded, and narrowly escaped with their lives. Then with the evening the Polish army came up, and hostilities ceased.

The village of Maciejowice stood in a hollow outside a wood among marshes. The night quarters of the staff were in the manor-house belonging to the Zamojski family. It, too, had been ravaged by Russian soldiers, the family portraits in a great hall on the first floor slashed by Cossack sabres, the contents of the library wantonly destroyed. No foreboding seemed to have hung over the Polish officers as they sat at supper. They were in high spirits, and peals of laughter greeted the quaint scraps that Niemcewicz read out from a handful of old Polish newspapers he had hit upon intact in a chest. Shortly after supper Kosciuszko lay down for a few hours' sleep; at midnight he rose and dictated to Niemcewicz his instructions for the day. Before sunrise the Russians were moving to the attack, and Kosciuszko was on his horse. Impelled by necessity, he gave orders to fire a village that lay in the line of the Russian advance. The lamentations of the women and children as they fled into the woods from the flames that were destroying their all, the wild cries of frightened birds and beasts, the volumes of smoke rising over ruined homes, combined to make up a scene of horror, unforgettable by those who witnessed it, and that must have wrung a heart such as Kosciuszko's. Under a steady Polish fire the Russian soldiers and cannon, advancing through mud and marsh, sank at every step. For three hours the Poles kept the enemy at bay, standing steadily against his terrific fire with artillery that was no match for his. The Polish staff were covered with branches that the Russian balls sent crashing from the trees. Kosciuszko himself fired the cannon with an accuracy of aim under which the Russians wavered. It appeared as though they were about to retreat. But the enemy's superiority of numbers, the strength of his artillery, began to tell, and his heavy fire sowed death among the Polish ranks. A shell burst between Kosciuszko, his aide-de-camp, Fiszer, and Niemcewicz, but left them unharmed. What Niemcewicz, who lived through it, describes as a hailstorm of bullets, grapeshot and shells, poured down upon the Polish lines. How any came out alive to tell the tale was to him a marvel. The dead lay in heaps. Not a Pole stirred from his post under this rain of fire. Each fell where he stood. Every artillery horse was by now killed or mutilated. Then at that moment—it was past midday—the Polish cannon were silent: the ammunition had run out. Riding madly through the Polish ranks, Kosciuszko shouted to his soldiers to fight on, to keep up heart, Poninski with fresh supplies was coming up. He did not come, and the rumour of treachery, never, however, proved, gathered about a name that was already of ill repute to a Polish ear. Galled by standing motionless without ammunition, a Polish battalion rashly charged, and the Russians broke through the Polish line. Niemcewicz, rushing up to repulse them at the head of a Lithuanian squadron, was wounded, captured by the Russians, and his men dispersed. Another faithful friend of Kosciuszko, Kopec, struggling to cut a way through for his general, and thrice wounded, was in his turn taken prisoner. The little Polish army was now encircled on all sides by the Russians, attacking in their whole strength. Then ensued a fearful bayonet charge in which the Poles were mowed down like corn before the sickles, each soldier falling at his post, yielding not to the enemy of their country, but only to death. The battalion of Dzialynski—he who had been among the most ardent propagators of the Rising in its beginning—died to the last man. One who passed over the battlefield before the close of day shuddered at the sight of those serried rows of the dead, testifying by the order in which they lay to the unbroken discipline in which they had died. Of that battlefield, such is the phrase, "the enemy only remained master by treading over the ranks of the corpses of our soldiers, still occupying after death the same place they had occupied in the battle."[1] Without hope of victory the Polish riflemen fired till their last cartridge was spent. With the Russians on all sides of them the gunners, standing at the cannons, had worked till the end. A final desperate effort was made by Kosciuszko to form up a front with a small band of his soldiers. His third horse was killed beneath him. He mounted another, when a wave of Russian cavalry swept in upon the broken remains of the Polish army, and all was over. Fighting in a hand-to-hand struggle in a marsh, Kosciuszko fell, covered with wounds, unconscious, and was taken prisoner by three young Russian ensigns. Only two thousand of the Poles who had fought at Maciejowice returned to Warsaw from that tragic and heroic field. Conducted to the manor where a few hours before he had slept by the side of Kosciuszko, Niemcewicz found there Kosciuszko's devoted officers, Sierakowski, Kniaziewicz, who had commanded the left wing at the battle. Kopec and Fiszer—all prisoners of war. The last drop was added to their cup of bitterness when they heard that nothing was known of the fate of their beloved leader, save the report that he was slain.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, Notes sur ma Captivite a Saint-Petersbourg.]



CHAPTER VIII

THE RUSSIAN PRISON

Late in the afternoon of that ill-fated day a stretcher, roughly and hastily put together, was carried by Russian soldiers into the courtyard of the manor. The prisoners saw that on it lay the scarcely breathing form of Kosciuszko. His body and head were covered with blood. He was insensible and apparently at the point of death. The dead silence as he was carried in was only broken by the sobs of his Polish officers. The surgeon dressed his wounds, and he was then taken to a large hall and left to the companionship of Niemcewicz, with Russian grenadiers posted inside each door. In the evening the hall was required by Fersen for dinner and his council of war, and Kosciuszko, still unconscious, was transferred, Niemcewicz following him, to a room over the cellar.

Towards the end of the battle the fiercest contest had raged around the Zamojski manor. At the last a hundred Polish soldiers had in the desperation of extremity defended the house, and fought it out till no round of ammunition remained to them. The Russians then burst in, and despatched at the point of the bayonet every Pole in every room of the building, including the cellar, where the only survivors of the heroic band took up their final stand. The bloodshed stopped when each man of them was dead or dying, and not before. The moans of those lying in their last agony in this cellar of death were, when the laughter and merrymaking of the Russian officers died away with the course of the hours, the only sound that Niemcewicz heard, as by the couch of his passionately loved and apparently dying leader he lay through the bitter cold of the October night, weeping not only for a dear friend, but for his country. At sunrise Kosciuszko spoke, as if waking from a trance. Seeing Niemcewicz, with his arm bandaged, beside him, he asked why his friend was wounded, and where they were. "Alas! we are prisoners of Russia," said Niemcewicz. "I am with you, and will never leave you,"[1] Tears rose to Kosciuszko's eyes, as he made reply that such a friend was a consolation in misfortune. The entrance of Russian officers, deputed to keep guard over them, interrupted the conversation. They were watched each moment, and their words and actions reported. Later on Fersen came in and addressed Kosciuszko courteously, speaking in German, which Niemcewicz—for Kosciuszko knew neither German nor Russian—interpreted. At midday a deafening discharge of musketry and cannon smote painfully upon the prisoners' ears: it was the salvo of joy for the Russian victory.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, Notes sur ma Captivite a Saint-Petersbourg.]

On the 13th of October the Russian army marched, and Kosciuszko and his fellow-Poles began their long, sad journey to a Russian prison. Kosciuszko travelled in a small carriage with a surgeon, Niemcewicz and the Polish generals in a separate conveyance, while the rest of the prisoners went on foot. Detachments of Russian cavalry rode in front and behind. An immense train of wagons, filled with the loot carried off from Polish homes, Polish cannon captured on the field, a car bearing the Polish flags with their national device of eagles, embroidered heavily with silver, added the final drop of bitterness to the lot of the defeated sons of a proud and gallant race. On the halt held the following day messengers came up from Warsaw, bringing Kosciuszko his personal effects and a letter from the National Council, conveying expressions of the highest eulogy and deep sympathy, with a present of four thousand ducats, of which Kosciuszko gave half to his fellow-prisoners.

The scene in Warsaw when the news of Kosciuszko's captivity reached it was, writes a Pole who was then in the town, the saddest sight he ever saw.[1] In every public place, in every class of society, in every home, the one refrain, broken by sobs, was: "Kosciuszko is no more." The leader was gone; but the men and women who were met wandering, weeping, in the streets, wringing their hands and mourning for the man they and the country had lost together, had no thought of giving up the struggle for their nation.

[Footnote 1: M. Oginski, Memoires. Paris, 1826.]

"Neither the duty of a citizen nor thy example permits us to despair for our country," wrote the National Council to Kosciuszko. The war was carried on, and the citizens of Warsaw went in their thousands to the ramparts, as in Kosciuszko's time, to hold the town against Suvorov's siege.

Together with their dispatches to Kosciuszko, the National Council sent a letter to Fersen, offering to give up all their Russian prisoners in exchange for Kosciuszko alone. The Russian general refused. Two days later Fersen received orders to join Suvorov, and the prisoners with a large detachment of Russian troops under Krushtzov were sent on into Russia by an immensely roundabout route.

The first part of the march led through Polish territory. The Polish prisoners watched, powerless, the ravages committed on their unhappy country by the army with which they travelled. The contents of mansion, shop, hut, were alike stolen. Even children's toys swelled the booty. Although the wound on Kosciuszko's head began to improve, he had lost the use of his legs and could not move without being carried; yet a Russian guard watched him incessantly. The rumour had gone round the Polish countryside that he had escaped from Maciejowice, and that the Russians had some feigned captive in his place. In their halts Krushtzov therefore insisted on the Polish proprietor of the villages, or the chief inhabitants of the towns, where the procession passed the night, presenting themselves in Kosciuszko's room to see with their own eyes that he was in truth the prisoner of Russia. In strong indignation at this insult to Kosciuszko, Niemcewicz writes, with excusable bitterness, that hitherto men had been known to make a show of wild beasts; now "wild beasts showed off the man."[1] At these interviews no free speech was possible between the fellow-Poles, as the guards were always present. They could only exchange the sympathy of sorrowing looks and equally sad, but guarded, words.

[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, op. cit.]

So long as the army marched through Poland, Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko. 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 Kosciuszko, 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 Kosciuszko and his devoted comrades, Kniaziewicz, Kopec, and the remaining Polish officers. Kosciuszko, 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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko'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 Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko's property. This alone told him that Kosciuszko was not far off; and cheered by that thought he was able, says he, "to resign himself to everything."[1]

[Footnote 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 Kosciuszko 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, Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko'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 Kosciuszko'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 Kosciuszko, 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*]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 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]

[Footnote 2: op. cit.]

Two years passed thus. In the November of 1796 there was an unusual stir in the fortress, which to the Poles immured there could mean only one thing: the death of their arch-enemy, Catherine II. After a few days the suspicion was confirmed. The Empress was scarcely in her coffin before the son she had hated, now Paul I, entered Kosciuszko's prison, accompanied by his retinue and by the Tsarewitch, Alexander, on whom for a transitory moment the fondest hopes of Poland were to rest, and whose friendship with a son of the house of Czartoryski is one of the romances of history. The Tsarewitch embraced Kosciuszko, and his father uttered the words: "I have come to restore your liberty." The shock was so overwhelming that the prisoner could not answer. The Tsar seated himself by Kosciuszko's side: and then ensued this remarkable colloquy between the Tsar of all the Russias and the hero of Polish freedom, which is known to us more or less textually from a Russian member of the court who was present, and also from the accounts of the Polish prisoners, who eagerly picked up its details which Niemcewicz collected and recorded.

"I always pitied your fate," said the Tsar, who, in the earlier days of his reign, through the wild eccentricity that was more correctly speaking madness, was not devoid of generous instincts; "but during my mother's rule I could do nothing to help you. But I have now taken it as the first duty of my sovereignty to confer freedom upon you. You are therefore free."

Kosciuszko bowed and, after expressing his thanks, replied:

"Sire, I have never grieved for my own fate, but I shall never cease to grieve over the fate of my country."

"Forget your country," said Paul. "The same lot has befallen her as so many other states of which only the memory has remained in history; and in that history you will always be gloriously remembered."

"Would rather that I should be forgotten," was Kosciuszko's reply, "and my country remain free. Certainly many states have fallen, but there is no example like the fall of Poland. ... It was in the very moment of her uprising, just when she was desirous to attain liberty of rule, precisely when she showed the greatest energy and patriotism, that Poland fell."

"But confess," went on the Tsar, "that this freedom of yours did not agree with the interests of the neighbouring states, and that your countrymen themselves served as the instrument of the destruction of their country."

"Excuse me, Your Imperial Majesty, from further explanations on that point, for I can neither think nor speak without strong feeling about my country's fall."

"You do not offend me," graciously replied Paul; "but on the contrary I esteem you the more, for it is the first time that I have spoken to a citizen whom I recognize as really loving his country. If at least the greater part of the Poles thought as you do, Poland might still exist."

"Sire," said Kosciuszko, with deep emotion, "that greater part was certainly there. If only Your Imperial Majesty could have been the eyewitness of that virtue, that patriotism, of which they gave no common proofs in the last Rising! I know how men tried to give Your Imperial Majesty the falsest and worst ideas about our nation, because they represented them in the eyes of the whole world as a horde of noisy ruffians, intolerant of rule and law, and therefore unworthy of existence. Virtuous and universal zeal only for the bettering of the country's lot, for freedom from oppression and disorder, was called sedition; the best desires of good citizenship were accounted as a crime, and as the result of a brawling Jacobinism: finally, not only against all justice, but against the true interests of Russia, the destruction of the unhappy country by the complete dismemberment of her territory was given out as the most salutary counsel. How many outrages, perilous for the lot of every state, have resulted from it!" said he, in words of which we all too clearly have seen the truth to-day. "How many fearful consequences, what universal misery for its victims!"

"See what fire!" said the Tsar, turning to his officers.

"Pardon me, Sire," said Kosciuszko. "Perhaps I was carried too far—perhaps;" he hesitated.

But no, the Tsar hastened to reassure him, he had given the monarch food for thought, he had spoken to his heart. Kosciuszko must ask for every comfort he required till he left Petersburg, and must trust Paul "as a friend."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

This was the first of more than one interview between Kosciuszko and the Tsar. At the second Kosciuszko begged for the release of all the Polish prisoners of the Rising scattered in Russia and Siberia. He and his comrades were now permitted to visit each other. Niemcewicz has recorded his painful impression as he saw his friend for the first time since they had entered the prison together, lying with bandaged head and crippled limb, with ravaged nerves, speaking faintly and making signs to warn Niemcewicz when the latter raised his voice that spies were listening at the door.

But Paul's pardon was not unconditional. Before granting a general amnesty he required of Kosciuszko and the leading Polish prisoners an oath of allegiance to himself and his successors. Thus Kosciuszko was called upon to face the bitterest sacrifice that even he had yet had to confront. On him depended whether the prison gates should be opened to twelve thousand fellow-Poles. At the cost of the most sacred feelings of his heart, after private consultations with Ignacy Potocki, who was among the prisoners in the fortress, and with whom he agreed that there was no alternative but to submit, Kosciuszko accepted the intolerable condition laid upon him, and took the oath. Upon the agony of that internal conflict he, with his accustomed reticence, remained silent. That there was some external pressure of a most harassing description on the part of the Russian ministers which tore the oath from his lips is proved by his own words in his letter to the Tsar two years later.

His intention was now to go to America, by Sweden and England. Rogerson, whose strong esteem he had gained, wrote to his friend, the Russian ambassador in London, begging him for the sake of their friendship to do all that he could for Kosciuszko, and entering into minute recommendations to ensure the latter's well-being in England. Kosciuszko had aroused a like admiration in the imperial family. At the farewell audience in the Winter Palace he was received with a pomp detestable to his every instinct, and carried in Catherine's wheel chair into the Tsar's private room. The Tsar loaded him with gifts, including a carriage especially adapted to the recumbent position in which he was forced to travel. The Tsaritsa chose to give him a costly turning-lathe and a set of cameos, while he offered her a snuff-box of his own making, which she held in her hand during her coronation, showing it with pride to Rogerson as a gift which, said she, "puts me in mind of a highly instructive moral."[1] These presents from the Russian court were intensely galling to Kosciuszko's feelings. He refused as many as he could. The rest that he accepted under compulsion he got rid of as soon as possible. His return present to the Tsaritsa was an act of courtesy, characteristic of Kosciuszko's chivalry to women; but he received with a marked coldness the advances of the Tsar, showered upon him in the moment's caprice, as was the manner of Paul I.[2] On the 19th of December, 1796, he turned his back upon Russia for ever and, accompanied by Niemcewicz, departed for Sweden.

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid.]



CHAPTER IX

EXILE

The great and romantic chapter of Kosciuszko's history is now closed. Twenty more years of life remained to him. Those years were passed in exile. He never again saw his country.

The third partition of Poland was carried out by Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1795, while the man who had offered his life and liberty to avert it lay in a Russian prison. Not even the span of Poland's soil which Kosciuszko and his soldiers had watered with their blood was left to her. To that extinction of an independent state, lying between Russia and the Central Powers, barring the progress of Prussia to the Baltic and the East, the most far-seeing politicians ascribe the world-war that has been so recently devastating the world.

It was therefore in bitter grief of heart that Kosciuszko set out for Sweden. Besides Niemcewicz, he had with him a young Polish officer, named Libiszewski, who had eagerly offered himself to serve Kosciuszko in any capacity till he reached the United States. He carried Kosciuszko to carriage or couch, and distracted his sadness by his admirable playing on the horn and by his sweet singing. He died still young—of fever in Cuba.

In the short northern day of four hours the party made a long and tedious journey, impeded by the bitter weather, through the pine forests of Finland. The country was buried in snow, and so rough was the travelling that the three Poles had to pass a night in the common hall of the inn, with pigs as their sleeping companions. Kosciuszko's fame had spread all over Europe. Sweden held herself proud that he was her guest, greeting him as "one of the greatest men of our century." At Stockholm the notables of the city crowded to pay their respects—on foot, in order not to disturb the invalid with the sound of carriages and horses. He was not, however, very accessible. By temperament he shrank from either publicity or fame; and in his state of physical and mental suffering he had no heart for the honours showered upon him. He systematically discouraged the forerunners of the modern interviewers who were eager for "copy," and as far as he could he kept to himself, his relaxations being his own drawing, and the music of which he was always passionately fond, and with which his Swedish admirers were careful to provide him. A Swedish writer, who was staying in the same hotel, desired to visit him, but dared not do so, partly for fear of intruding upon him, and partly because he owned that he could not keep from tears at the sight of the Polish patriot, so deeply had Kosciuszko's history affected the public of those days. Finally, he made the plunge, and asked Kosciuszko's permission for a young Swedish painter to take his portrait. Kosciuszko courteously refused; but an engraver surreptitiously took notes of his features, and reproduced them in a likeness that travelled all over Sweden, depicting him, as our own Cosway did afterwards, reclining, "his face," says the Swedish description, "expressing the sufferings of his soul over his country's fate."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

From Stockholm Kosciuszko passed on to Goteborg to await a ship for England. Here too the inhabitants vied with each other to do him honour, and arranged amateur concerts for him in his rooms. On the 16th of May the Poles embarked. After three weeks' passage in a small merchant vessel, they landed at Gravesend, and thence reached London. "Kosciuszko, the hero of freedom, is here," announced the Gentleman's Magazine; and indeed the English papers were full of him. He stayed in Leicester Square. The whole of London made haste to visit him. The leading politicians, including Fox, men of letters, among whom we find Sheridan, the beauties of the day and the rulers of fashion, all alike thronged his rooms. To Walter Savage Landor, then a mere youth, the sight of Kosciuszko awoke the sympathy for Poland that he never lost, to which English literature owes one of his Imaginary Conversations. More than half a century later he looked back to the moment in which he spoke to Kosciuszko as the happiest of his life. The Whig Club presented Kosciuszko with a sword of honour. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire pressed upon him a costly ring, which went the way of most of the gifts that Kosciuszko received: he gave them away to friends. All such tokens of admiration had never counted for anything in Kosciuszko's life, and now they were the merest baubles to a man who had seen his country fall. In the portrait that, against his wish and without his knowledge, Cosway painted, said by Niemcewicz to resemble him as none other, we see him, lying with bandaged head in an attitude of deep and sorrowful musing. The face, the whole attitude, are those of one absorbed by an overmastering grief that filled his soul to the exclusion of all else. The fine portrait has found its way to Kosciuszko's native land, and is now in Warsaw. The English doctor recommended by Rogerson attended Kosciuszko assiduously, and the Russian ambassador's kindness was so unfailing that Kosciuszko, sending him his farewells as he left England, wrote: "If ever I recover part of my health it will be sweet to me to remember that it is to your attentions, to the interest that you took in me, that I shall owe it."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, Kosciuszko.]

Bristol was at that time the English port of sailings for America. It was there that after a fortnight's stay in London Kosciuszko betook himself, passing a night in Bath on the way. He found in Bristol old friends of his American days. He was the guest of one of them, now the United States consul, as long as he stayed in the town. A guard of honour received him, long processions of the townsfolk flocked to catch a glimpse of him, a military band played every evening before the consulate, and the city gave him a handsome silver service. An Englishman who visited him in Bristol records the impression that Kosciuszko made on all who saw him, of one whose whole being breathed devotion to his country. The same witness speaks of a soul unbroken by misfortune, by wounds, poverty, and exile; of an eagle glance, of talk full of wit and wisdom.

The course down the Avon to the point where Kosciuszko's ship lay at anchor was a triumphal progress. He was accompanied by English officers in full dress, by the American consul and a host of well-wishers. All heads were bared as he was carried on board. The whole length of the river handkerchiefs were waved from the banks. Farewells resounded from every rock and promontory, where spectators had crowded to see the last of the Polish hero. Boats shot out from the private dwellings on the waterside, laden with flowers and fruits for the departing guest. Not a few men and women boarded the ship and accompanied Kosciuszko for some distance before they could bring themselves to part with him.

For nearly two months Kosciuszko and his Polish companions tossed on the Atlantic, running on one occasion a near chance of shipwreck. Philadelphia was their destination. Once in America, Kosciuszko trod soil familiar and dear to him. "I look upon America," he said, replying in French to the deputation of Philadelphia's citizens who came on board to welcome him, "as my second country, and I feel myself too happy when I return to her." The cannon from the fort and a storm of cheering greeted him as he landed, and amidst cries of "Long live Kosciuszko!" the citizens drew his carriage to his lodging.

Washington had just ceased to be President. His successor, Adams, wrote congratulating Kosciuszko on his arrival, "after the glorious efforts you have made on a greater theatre."[1] Washington wrote also:" Having just been informed of your safe arrival in America, I was on the point of writing to you a congratulatory letter on the occasion, welcoming you to the land whose liberties you have been so instrumental in establishing, when I received your favour of the 23rd. [A letter of Kosciuszko's with a packet he had been requested to convey to Washington.] ... I beg you to be assured that no one has a higher respect and veneration for your character than I have; and no one more sincerely wished, during your arduous struggle in the cause of liberty and your country, that it might be crowned with success. But the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and mortals must submit. I pray you to believe that at all times and under any circumstances it would make me happy to see you at my last retreat, from which I never expect to be more than twenty miles again."[1*]

[Footnote 1: Op. cit.]

[Footnote 1*: Writings of George Washington, ed. Jared Sparks.]

The story of the meeting between Washington and Kosciuszko, of Kosciuszko's words, "Father, do you recognize your son?" is a myth. They met neither in Philadelphia nor elsewhere. The above letter is the last indication of any intercourse between them. Washington at this period was regarded with no favour by the democracy. Kosciuszko's sympathies were with the latter and with Jefferson, and he never accepted the invitation to Washington's home in Mount Vernon.

Yellow fever breaking out in Philadelphia, Kosciuszko went for a time elsewhere: first to New York, to the beautiful house of his old friend and commander, Gates, later to New Brunswick, where he stayed with another friend of the past. General White, in a family circle that attracted his warm regard. He was still confined to his sofa, and amused himself by his favourite pastime of drawing and painting, tended by the ladies of the house with a solicitude which drew from him after he had gone back to Philadelphia a charming "hospitable roof" letter. I have been unable to see the original English in which Kosciuszko wrote this letter, which is given in a privately printed American memoir. I am therefore obliged to translate it from the Polish version, which is in its turn a translation into Polish from Kosciuszko's English. We therefore lose the flavour of Kosciuszko's not wholly correct manipulation of our language:—

"Madam,

"I cannot rest till I obtain your forgiveness in all its fulness for the trouble I gave you during my stay in your house. ... Perhaps I was the cause of depriving you of amusements more suited to your liking and pleasure, than busying yourself with me. You never went out to pay visits. You were kind enough to ask me daily what I liked, what I did not like: all my desires were carried out; all my wishes were anticipated, to gratify me and to make my stay agreeable. Let me receive an answer from you, forgiving me, I beg Eliza [her daughter] to intercede for me. I owe you too great a debt to be able to express it in words adequate to my obligation and my gratitude. Let this suffice, that I shall never forget it, and that its memory will never be extinguished for even one moment in my heart."[1]