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 Captivité à
Saint-Pétersbourg_.]
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_.]