John Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, Vol. 2 (of 2)

At break of day the whole force of the Russian right wing, with a terrible fire of fifty pieces of artillery and columns of infantry, charged the Polish left with the determination of carrying it by a single and overpowering effort. The Poles, with six thousand five hundred men and twelve pieces of artillery, not yielding a foot of ground, and knowing they could hope for no succour, resisted this attack for several hours, until the Russians slackened their fire. About ten o'clock the plain was suddenly covered with the Russian forces issuing from the cover of the forest, seeming one undivided mass of troops. Two hundred pieces of cannon, posted on a single line, commenced a fire which made the earth tremble, and was more terrible than the oldest officers, many of whom had fought at Marengo and Austerlitz, had ever beheld. The Russians now made an attack upon the right wing; but foiled in this as upon the left, Diebitsch directed the strength of his army against the Forest of Elders, hoping to divide the Poles into two parts. One hundred and twenty pieces of cannon were brought to bear on this one point, and fifty battalions, incessantly pushed to the attack, kept up a scene of massacre unheard of in the annals of war. A Polish officer who was in the battle told me that the small streams which intersected the forest were so choked with dead that the infantry marched directly over their bodies. The heroic Poles, with twelve battalions, for four hours defended the forest against the tremendous attack. Nine times they were driven out, and nine times, by a series of admirably-executed manœuvres, they repulsed the Russians with immense loss. Batteries, now concentrated in one point, were in a moment hurried to another, and the artillery advanced to the charge like cavalry, sometimes within a hundred feet of the enemy's columns, and there opened a murderous fire of grape.

At three o'clock the generals, many of whom were wounded, and most of whom had their horses shot under them, and fought on foot at the head of their divisions, resolved upon a retrograde movement, so as to draw the Russians on the open plain. Diebitsch, supposing it to be a flight, looked over to the city and exclaimed, "Well, then, it appears that, after this bloody day, I shall take tea in the Belvidere Palace." The Russian troops debouched from the forest. A cloud of Russian cavalry, with several regiments of heavy cuirassiers at their head, advanced to the attack. Colonel Pientka, who had kept up an unremitting fire from his battery for five hours, seated with perfect sang-froid upon a disabled piece of cannon, remained to give another effective fire, then left at full gallop a post which he had so long occupied under the terrible fire of the enemy's artillery. This rapid movement of his battery animated the Russian forces. The cavalry advanced on a trot upon the line of a battery of rockets. A terrible discharge was poured into their ranks, and the horses, galled to madness by the flakes of fire, became wholly ungovernable, and broke away, spreading disorder in every direction; the whole body swept helplessly along the fire of the Polish infantry, and in a few minutes was so completely annihilated that, of a regiment of cuirassiers who bore inscribed on their helmets the "Invincibles," not a man escaped. The wreck of the routed cavalry, pursued by the lancers, carried along in its flight the columns of infantry; a general retreat commenced, and the cry of "Poland for ever" reached the walls of Warsaw to cheer the hearts of its anxious inhabitants. So terrible was the fire of that day, that in the Polish army there was not a single general or staff officer who had not his horse killed or wounded under him; two thirds of the officers, and, perhaps, of the soldiers, had their clothes pierced with balls, and more than a tenth part of the army were wounded. Thirty thousand Russians and ten thousand Poles were left on the field of battle; rank upon rank lay prostrate on the earth, and the Forest of Elders was so strewed with bodies that it received from that day the name of the "Forest of the Dead." The Czar heard with dismay, and all Europe with astonishment, that the crosser of the Balkan had been foiled under the walls of Warsaw.

All day, my companion said, the cannonading was terrible. Crowds of citizens, of both sexes and all ages, were assembled on the spot where we stood, earnestly watching the progress of the battle, sharing in all its vicissitudes, in the highest state of excitement as the clearing up of the columns of smoke showed when the Russians or the Poles had fled; and he described the entry of the remnant of the Polish army into Warsaw as sublime and terrible; their hair and faces were begrimed with powder and blood; their armour shattered and broken, and all, even dying men, were singing patriotic songs; and when the fourth regiment, among whom was a brother of my companion, and who had particularly distinguished themselves in the battle, crossed the bridge and filed slowly through the streets, their lances shivered against the cuirasses of the guards, their helmets broken, their faces black and spotted with blood, some erect, some tottering, and some barely able to sustain themselves in the saddle, above the stern chorus of patriotic songs rose the distracted cries of mothers, wives, daughters, and lovers, seeking among this broken band for forms dearer than life, many of whom were then sleeping on the battle-field. My companion told me that he was then a lad of seventeen, and had begged with tears to be allowed to accompany his brother; but his widowed mother extorted from him a promise that he would not attempt it. All day he had stood with his mother on the very spot where we did, his hand in hers, which she grasped convulsively, as every peal of cannon seemed the knell of her son; and when the lancers passed, she sprang from his side as she recognised in the drooping figure of an officer, with his spear broken in his hand, the figure of her gallant boy. He was then reeling in his saddle, his eye was glazed and vacant, and he died that night in their arms.

The tyranny of the Grand-duke Constantine, the imperial viceroy, added to the hatred of the Russians, which is the birthright of every Pole, induced the unhappy revolution of eighteen hundred and thirty. Although, on the death of Alexander, Constantine waived in favour of his brother Nicolas his claim to the throne of Russia, his rule in Poland shows that it was not from any aversion to the exercise of power.

When Constantine was appointed its commander-in-chief, the Polish army ranked with the bravest in Europe. The Polish legions under Dombrowski and Poniatowski had kept alive the recollections of the military glory of their fallen nation. Almost annihilated by the bloody battles in Italy, where they met their old enemies under Suwarrow, the butcher of Praga, the proud remnants reorganized and formed the fifth corps of the "grande armée," distinguished themselves at Smolensk, Borodino, Kalouga, and the passage of the Berezina, took the field with the wreck of the army in Saxony, fought at Dresden and Leipsic, and, when Napoleon told them, brave as they were, that they were free to go home if they pleased, they scorned to desert him in his waning fortunes, and accompanied him to Paris. Alexander promised an amnesty, and they marched with him to Warsaw. Within the first six months many officers of this army had been grossly insulted; an eyewitness told me that he had seen, on the great square of Warsaw, the high sheriff tear off the epaulettes from the shoulders of an officer, and, in the presence of the whole troops, strike him on the cheek with his hand.

It would, perhaps, be unjust to enumerate, as I heard them, the many causes of oppression that roused to revolt the slumbering spirit of the Poles; in the midst of which the French revolution threw all Poland into commotion. The three days of July were hailed with rapture by every patriotic heart; the new revolutionary movements in Belgium cheered them on; and eighty young men, torn from the altars while praying for the souls of their murdered countrymen on the anniversary of the butchery at Praga, thrilled every heart and hurried the hour of retribution. The enthusiasm of youth struck the first blow. A band of ardent young men of the first families attended the meetings of secret patriotic associations; and six of them, belonging to the military school, suspecting they were betrayed, early in the evening went to their barracks, and proposed to their comrades a plan for liberating their country. The whole corps, not excepting one sick in bed, amounting in all to about a hundred and fifty, took up arms, and, under a lieutenant of nineteen, attacked the palace of Constantine, and almost secured his person. The grand-duke was then asleep on a couch in a room opening upon a corridor of the Belvidere Palace, and, roused by a faithful valet, had barely time to throw a robe over him and fly. The insurgents, with cries of vengeance, rushed into the interior of the palace, driving before them the chief of the city police and the aiddecamp of the grand-duke. The latter had the presence of mind to close the door of the grand-duke's apartment before he was pierced through with a dozen bayonets. The wife of the grand-duke, the beautiful and interesting princess for whom he had sacrificed a crown, hearing the struggle, was found on her knees offering up prayers to Heaven for the safety of her husband. Constantine escaped by a window; and the young soldiers, foiled in their attempt, marched into the city, and, passing the barracks of the Russian guards, daringly fired a volley to give notice of their coming. Entering the city, they broke open the prisons and liberated the state prisoners, burst into the theatres, crying out, "Women, home; men, to arms," forced the arsenal, and in two hours forty thousand men were under arms. Very soon the fourth Polish regiment joined them; and before midnight the remainder of the Polish troops in Warsaw, declaring that their children were too deeply implicated to be abandoned, espoused the popular cause. Some excesses were committed; and General Stanislaus Potocki, distinguished in the revolution of Kosciusko, for hesitating was killed, exclaiming with his last breath that it was dreadful to die by the hands of his countrymen.