THE EVE OF THE RISING
In Galicia, Kosciuszko was welcomed by a crowd of sympathizers. The
Czartoryskis, then residing on their Galician estates, showed him such
marked proofs of their admiration that it was even said, without
foundation, that Princess Czartoryska destined Kosciuszko for the
husband of one of the princesses. A married daughter drew his portrait,
inscribing it, after the taste of the epoch, with the words: "Tadeusz
Kosciuszko, good, valiant, but unhappy." On his feast-day, October 28th,
the ladies of the family presented him with a wreath woven of leaves
from an oak planted by the Polish hero with whose name Kosciuszko's is
often coupled: Jan Sobieski, the deliverer of Christendom. At the
banquet held on this occasion was present, not only Kosciuszko's friend,
Orlowski, like him banished and for the same reason, but a young son of
the house who had fought in the recent Russo-Polish war, Adam
Czartoryski, soon to be removed by Catherine II's orders as a hostage to
the Russian court, and who in later life was one of the principal and
noblest figures in Polish politics of the nineteenth century. We shall
see his path again touching Kosciuszko's at a critical juncture in the
history of their nation.
The bitterness of an exile's wanderings, so familiar to the generations
of Poles that followed through the unhappy years of the succeeding
century, was now to be tasted by Poland's national hero. The Austrian
Government took alarm at the evidences of popularity that were showered
upon him. The Russian Government would not have his presence near the
Polish frontiers, and the Russian sentries received orders to be on the
look-out not to permit him to enter any Polish town. Legends ran through
the ranks of the superstitious Muscovite soldiery that Kosciuszko had,
notwithstanding, come up to the sentries, and when fired upon had
changed himself into the form of a cat. Such tales apart, on December
5th he was given notice by the Austrian authorities to quit the country
within twelve hours.
"I am grieved to leave beloved Poland, my friends and so many hearts
that were good to me," sadly writes Kosciuszko. Spies and secret agents
were watching the posts; so he and his fellow-Poles protected themselves
and their correspondence by various precautions, fictitious names,
confidential messengers. "Bieda"--misfortune--was the pseudonym by which
Kosciuszko, his heart heavy with foreboding for his country and grief at
her loss, signed himself, and wished to be known, as he set out for a
foreign land. Cracow lay in the route that as a fugitive from the
Austrian Government he was obliged to choose. He tarried a few days in
the beautiful old city that is the sepulchre of Poland's kings, and
where he was after death to lie in the last resting-place of those whom
his nation most honours. Thence he journeyed to Leipzig.
In Leipzig were the men of the nation whose minds and aims were in the
closest sympathy with his. Kollontaj, Ignacy and Stanislas Potocki, and
the band of Poles who had been responsible for the drawing up of the
Constitution of the 3rd of May, had gathered together in the Saxon city
out of reach of Russian vengeance, where they could best concert
measures for saving Poland. In January 1793 the news reached them that
Prussia, whose attitude in regard to scraps of paper is no recent
development, had helped herself to that portion of Great Poland which
had escaped her at the first partition, and to Thorn and Danzig, which
she had so long coveted, while Russia took the southern provinces of
Poland and part of Lithuania.
But the camp of Polish patriots in Leipzig would not give Poland up for
lost. "She will not remain without assistance and means to save her,"
wrote Kollontaj. "Let them do what they will; they will not bring about
her destruction." "Kosciuszko is now in Paris"--this was early in 1793.
"He is going to England and Sweden." As a matter of fact he went to
neither at that time. "That upright man is very useful to his
country."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Letters of Hugo Kollontaj_.]
It was to France, which had won Kosciuszko's heart in his youth, and
whose help he had seen given to America in the latter's struggle for her
freedom, that he now made his way to beg a young Republic's assistance
for his country. He was not a diplomat himself; but Kollontaj and Ignacy
Potocki were behind him with their instructions. Fortune never favoured
Kosciuszko. He arrived in Paris shortly before the execution of Louis
XVI. He may even have been in the crowd around the scaffold, the witness
of a scene that, however strong his popular sympathies, would have
inspired a man of his stamp with nothing but horror and condemnation.
The European coalition was formed against France: and Poland was
forgotten. The second partition by which Russia and Prussia secured the
booty that they had, as we have seen, a few months previously arrogated
to themselves, was effected in a Europe convulsed with war, that little
noticed and scarcely protested against the dismemberment of a European
state and the aggrandizement of two others, with its fatal consequence
of Prussia's rise to power. The tale of the scene in the Diet of Grodno,
convoked under the compulsion of the Russian armies to ratify the
partition, is well known: how the few deputies who consented to attend
sat with Russian cannon turned upon them, while Russian troops barred
all the exits of the hall and carried off by night to Siberia those
members who protested against the overthrow of their nation: how the
group of Poles, deprived of all other means of defending their country,
opposed an absolute silence to every proposal of their enemies, till the
deed was signed that left only a shred of territory, in its turn doomed
to fresh destruction, to the Republic of Poland.
From Lebrun, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kosciuszko
succeeded in winning the promise of financial assistance in the war for
Polish independence that the national party was projecting; but shortly
after his interview with Kosciuszko Lebrun lost liberty and office. With
Danton Kosciuszko would have nothing to do, and in the sanguinary scenes
of the Terror all public traces of the Pole are lost. It is certain that
he had no dealings with Robespierre or with any of the men who then sat
in the French revolutionary tribunals. How strongly he abhorred their
manner of revolution is proved not only from expressions he let drop
during his own dictatorship, but still more by his mode of proceeding
when he himself was responsible for a new government of state. He was a
democrat always; but in the best sense of the word.
Seeing that there was no prospect of gaining anything for Poland from
France, Kosciuszko remained in seclusion during his further stay in
Paris, writing in the blood-stained city the record to which we have
already alluded of the national war in which he had lately fought. In
this work he freely criticizes all the errors on the part of its leaders
which he had seen, and in vain pointed out to Poniatowski, during its
course; but nothing could shake his conviction that the Polish cause
could have triumphed. "If," he writes, "the whole army had been
assembled beyond the Vistula with volunteers and burghers from the
cities of Warsaw and Cracow, it would have risen to sixty thousand, and
with a king at its head, fighting for its country and independence, what
power, I ask, could have conquered it? "He refers to the sights he had
beheld in the American War as a proof of what soldiers could do without
pay, if animated by enthusiasm for a sacred cause. That patriotic fire,
says he, burned as brightly in his own country: the Polish soldier, the
Polish citizen, were equally ready to sacrifice all. "The spirit was
everywhere, but no use was made of their enthusiasm and patriotism. ...
The weakness of the King without military genius, without character or
love of his country, has now plunged our country, perhaps for ever, into
anarchy and subjection to Muscovy."[1]
[Footnote 1: MS. of Kosciuszko in _Pictures of Poles and of Poland in
the Eighteenth Century_, by Edward Raczynski.]
Thus wrote Kosciuszko in the day when a peasant soldiery was unknown in
Poland; and a few months later he was leading his regiments of reapers
and boatmen to the national Rising.
There was nothing more for him to do in Paris. His intended attempt in
England was given up, for Kollontaj received a broad hint from the
British representative in Saxony that Kosciuszko's presence would be
both unwelcome to George III and profitless to the Polish cause.
Kosciuszko may then have gone on from France to Brussels, but in the
summer of 1793 he was back in Leipzig in close consultation with Ignacy
Potocki.
The condition of Poland was by now lamentable. Her position was that of
a nation at the mercy of a foreign army, ravaged by war, although she
was not at war. Russians garrisoned every town. Russian soldiers were
systematically pillaging and devastating the country districts,
terrorizing village and town alike. Poles were arrested in their own
houses at the will of their Russian conquerors, and despatched to
Siberia. Hidden confederations, especially among the Polish youth, were
being carried on all over Poland, preparing to rise in defence of the
national freedom. In the teeth of the Russian garrison and of Catherine
II's plenipotentiary, Igelstrom, Warsaw sent secret emissaries to the
scattered remnants of the Polish army; and in the conferences that were
held at dead of night the choice of the nation fell upon Kosciuszko as
the leader above all others who should avenge the national dishonour and
wrest back at the point of the sword the independence of Poland. In the
beginning of September 1793 two Polish delegates carried the proposal to
him where he still remained in Leipzig.
The great moment in the life of Tadeusz Kosciuszko had now arrived. His
fiery and enthusiastic soul leapt to its call; but with none of the
headlong precipitance that would have been its ruin. Kosciuszko was too
great a patriot to disdain wariness and cool calculation. He never
stirred without seeing each step clearly mapped out before him. He took
his counsels with Potocki and his other Polish intimates in Saxony; then
formulated his plan of the Rising. Each district of Poland and Lithuania
was to be under the command of some citizen who would undertake secretly
to beat up the inhabitants to arms. The people could choose their own
officers according to the general wish. Special insistence was laid on
the duties of calling the peasants to fight side by side with the
landowners. The Polish peasant had hitherto been counted incapable of
bearing arms: Kosciuszko overrode this ancient prejudice with results
that have given one of the finest pages to the history of Poland.
He then went alone with his confidant, Zajonczek, to the Polish
frontiers to collect information. He sent round messengers to the
different provinces of Poland and Lithuania carrying his letters and
full instructions, while Zajonczek, under a false name, was despatched
to Warsaw. The report the latter gave to Kosciuszko on his return was
not satisfactory.
Matters were not as yet ripe for the undertaking. Financial means in the
widespread ruin that had come upon Poland through the overrunning of her
territories by a hostile soldiery were lacking, in spite of the private
generosity of such a donor as the Warsaw banker, Kapostas. The
difficulties of getting together a fighting force when Russian soldiers,
closely supervising every movement of the Poles, occupied the country
and the Polish divisions had been purposely drafted to great distances
from each other by the Empress, were almost insuperable. The peasant
rising upon which Kosciuszko had built his best hopes was unprepared.
But two elements remained that should, as pointed out by Zajonczek,
consolidate and ensure a great national Rising: universal detestation of
the Russian and limitless confidence in the chosen national leader.
Kosciuszko deemed it advisable to wait. "It is impossible," he said
after receiving Zajonczek's report, "to build on such frail foundations;
for it would be a sad thing to begin lightly and without consideration,
only to fall." He himself, recognizable as he was through all Poland,
was too well known to act as a secret propagandist in his own country;
so in order to throw dust in the eyes of Russia and Prussia he retired
to Italy for some months. In Florence he found Niemcewicz. Niemcewicz
tells how one night as he sat reading by his lamp the door burst open,
the Polish greeting, "Praised be Jesus Christ," rang on the exile's ear,
and a former colleague of the poet's hurried in with the simple words:
"I have come for Kosciuszko."[1] But the last act was played out in
Dresden, that for long after Kosciuszko's day remained a stronghold of
Polish emigration. While Kosciuszko was taking final deliberation there
with Kollontaj and Ignacy Potocki, two Poles came straight from Poland,
and on their knees besought Kosciuszko to give the word. The moment was
now or never. Placards were being fastened mysteriously on the walls of
Warsaw, calling to the Poles to rise. Patriotic writings were scattered
broadcast, patriotic articles printed, in spite of the rigorous Russian
censorship, in the Polish papers. Plays were acted in the theatre whose
double meaning, uncomprehended by the Russians who sat in crowds in the
audience, were fiery appeals to Polish patriotism. The streets of
Warsaw, all Poland and Lithuania, were seething with agitation and
secret hope. The suspicions of Igelstrom were aroused. He resolved to
take over the arsenal in Warsaw and to disarm and demobilize the Polish
army. In this dilemma Kosciuszko was compelled to throw his all on one
card or to fail. He therefore decided on the war; and in March 1794 he
re-entered Poland as the champion of her freedom.
[Footnote 1: J. Niemcewicz, _Recollections of My Times_, Paris, 1848
(Polish).]