Poland

by James A. Michener

  He even asked this question of Countess Lubonska during one of his visits home when the Seym was not in session, and she responded gloomily: ‘I’m terribly afraid a great theft is under way, Tytus. Let’s discuss this with the count.’

  When Tytus presented Lubonski with his evidences of Prussian and Russian duplicity, he found the count reconciled to whatever evil might happen. ‘Your Seym has gone too far too fast. Any one of the reforms might have been palatable. I have nothing against townsmen owning a little land. But taken altogether … it’s inescapable that Russia should react unfavorably.’

  ‘But you’ve always sided with Austria,’ the countess said. ‘If what Tytus reports is true, there could be a partition between Prussia and Russia alone. Poland could even disappear.’

  ‘Now that’s ridiculous,’ the count said. ‘Poland will always be needed where it is. If it didn’t already exist, Russia and Prussia would have to invent it.’

  ‘As a Habsburg man,’ Tytus asked, ‘are you happy to see Austria excluded?’

  ‘Such things are of little moment, Tytus. Poland will always be there, and if a few miles are chopped off for Prussia and a few for Russia, no great harm is done.’

  He ordered refreshments and then heard that his son and Bukowski’s were tending horses at the stables, and he sent for them, and when the young men appeared—Roman Lubonski, aged twenty-two, tall and extremely shy, and Feliks Bukowski, a year younger and a slender, healthy fellow—he asked them to join the discussion, for he was eager to have his son learn the workings of Polish politics, and this meant that young Bukowski must, too, for in a sense, well-adjusted Feliks was a planned companion for the self-consciously diffident Roman.

  ‘Tytus has been telling us that things looked dark at Warsaw. Explain to the boys.’ And Tytus gave a brief summary of the ominous slide which he and his friends in the Seym had witnessed, concluding: ‘It looks like war.’

  ‘Should it come,’ the count said, ‘we have no part in it … no interest in it. Do you understand that, young men?’

  ‘I should think we’d all be very interested,’ Feliks said.

  ‘I agree,’ his father said hastily, without considering what effect such opposition to the count’s opinion might have. To his relief, Lubonski did not lose his temper: ‘All we’re discussing is a little trimming of the fat. Russia wants a few miles that Poland doesn’t need. Prussia wants her share. And there’s no more to it. To start a war over such inconsequentials would be folly. Don’t you agree, Tytus?’ And this time Tytus nodded.

  But when Bukowski and his son were back at their own home the discussion was quite different, for Tytus said: ‘I’m a Pole, Feliks, and so are you. What happens up there concerns me and I hope to God it concerns you … always.’

  ‘The count says we’re Austrians now. But the countess tells me on the sly: “You’re Polish and always will be.” I asked her if she was Polish too, and she said: “Forever.” ’

  Tytus led his son to a window, and as if to lend emphasis to what he was about to say, pointed toward the river: ‘As long as the Vistula flows, it waters the soul of Poland.’

  ‘What can be done if Russia and Prussia attack?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ his father said in a frank admission of the futility that oppressed him. ‘But the time will come, Feliks, and be attentive to recognize it when it does come, when patriots will arise and sweep Austrians out of our lands, and Germans out of the west, and Russians out of the east.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Feliks asked.

  ‘As sure as a man can be. Poland will be Poland again.’

  ‘When?’

  Tytus slumped in a chair and pondered that most difficult of questions, and when he had weighed all possibilities, he felt that he must speak honestly with his son: ‘I fear there will be another great retreat, and then perhaps another. It’s even possible that our lovely neighbors will gobble us up completely. For a time. Maybe even for a long time, because they’re powerful and we’re weak.’ He rose from his chair, and again he and his son looked down at the great river which had always commanded so much of their family’s life, and his voice was strong as he said: ‘As long as the Vistula flows, Poland will be Poland.’

  Two weeks later a most fatuous debate erupted in the Seym, proving that even a patriot like Tytus Bukowski could behave like a child when some matter of truly Polish concern had to be handled. This one involved horses.

  A deputy with experience in both Russia and Prussia addressed the parliament with some vigor:

  ‘I have visited five foreign nations in my day, and being of a military cast of mind, I have invariably studied the armies of the lands I’ve been in. And I want to assure you gentlemen that we in Poland are committing a terrible mistake, which must be corrected if this nation is to preserve its existence.

  ‘Listen to these figures. In the Prussian army the foot soldiers who fight the battles and take the land constitute sixty-eight percent; cavalry who dash about for show, thirty-two percent. [Here there was a wild upheaval as cavalry officers in the Seym demanded a retraction, which the speaker was forced to give.] I meant no aspersion on our proudest branch of service.

  ‘In Russia the proportion is sixty-nine to thirty-one in favor of the foot soldier. In Austria, which has always been partial to cavalry and losing important battles, something closer to sixty to forty. [Here again there was rioting and a demand for another apology, this time not only to the cavalry but to Austrian heroism.] In France, so far as we can ascertain during the revolution, seventy to thirty, and in England, where they fight with heroic courage to win their battles, which they seem always to do, seventy-two infantry to twenty-eight cavalry.

  ‘And what is the proportion in Poland? Foot soldiers who do the fighting, twenty-nine percent; and cavalry who—[Cries of Careful. Retract. Retract. And a general disturbance in which Delegate Tytus Bukowski, who loved horses, challenged the speaker to a duel. Unperturbed, the critic continued.] So we must ask ourselves whether in our new army, which the Seym has so courageously authorized, we intend to have the infantry fighting or the cavalry parading.’

  The debate, so forthrightly presented, fell quite out of hand, and it was the general opinion of all the delegates, save those who had traveled abroad or studied military history, that no Polish gentleman worthy of that distinguished name would go into battle on foot; it had never been done and it never would be. Orators reminded the Seym of the gallant Polish knights who had ridden into battle at Grunwald in 1410 and of the even more dashing, daring winged cavalry who had defeated the Turks in Vienna in 1683.

  ‘The honor of Poland has always ridden astride some great horse, and it always will,’ cried a Lubomirski appointee, and Tytus Bukowski, speaking for Count Lubonski, said: ‘The Polish infantry is a rabble of peasants armed with clubs, and no gentleman would have anything to do with it.’ At the conclusion of a fiery oration defending the horse, he renewed his challenge to the delegate who had opened this subject, but the acting chairman, a clergyman, prevailed upon him to withdraw it, which he did in a phrase which circulated approvingly throughout the castles of Poland: ‘As long as Poland has a well-trained cavalry, she will remain free, and if the day ever comes when she relies on the foot soldier, she will march to her surrender.’

  But when in the summer of 1792 a group of magnates begged Czarina Catherine to send in an army to protect their Golden Freedom from the nihilistic reforms proposed by the Seym, and when the ardent defenders of the horse saw that the Russians came with few cavalry and many foot soldiers, who occupied and held on to territory, even men like Tytus Bukowski had to confess their error, for the new-style Russian army was irresistible. And when shortly thereafter Prussian armies of comparable composition began to win great victories in the west, Polish reformers saw that their cause was doomed; by the beginning of 1793 all was lost.

  Tytus did not hurry back to the sanctuary in Austrian Poland to which he was entitled. Circumstances had converted him into a patriot;
with like-minded friends, he had given Poland one of the finest constitutions in the world, one of the best forms of government, guaranteeing freedom for all within a workable future, and he could not stand idly by and see this noble vision perish.

  Count Lubonski, aware, from things his wife had disclosed, that Tytus might stay with the reformers, saw to it that the two young men—his son and Bukowski’s—did not bolt off to join him; he kept them tight within his castle and was careful to censor what news reached them. They were fine lads, he thought, better educated by far than he had been at their age, and although Roman did seem rather slow at times and reticent to state his opinions, when he did so they proved surprisingly sound. He had his mother’s brilliance of insight, his father’s tremendous stability, and the count could visualize him performing well at the court in Vienna. ‘He could easily become the governor general of Polish Austria.’ Lubonski told his wife, ‘and I like the way in which young Bukowski helps him in this developing period. We must look out for young Feliks and assist him when we can, because I’m afraid his father is irresponsible.’

  Tytus Bukowski was proving his lack of stability rather spectacularly. Gathering about him eighteen members of the Seym, he organized a cavalry unit and placed it at the disposal of the general defending Warsaw, but the Polish effort was so chaotic, compared to the steady pressure of the Prussians from the west and the Russians from the east, that not even the valiant efforts of the patriots accomplished anything, and a general debacle ensued.

  The army was defeated. The traitorous magnates who had invited Catherine in to devastate the country she had once given to her bedfellow Poniatowski fled the country. Prussia and Russia occupied the entire nation, or as much of it as they cared to. And tall, austere Baron von Eschl and short, clever Fyodor Kuprin met as before to draw the new lines.

  When Bukowski saw the map he choked with despair. This was not the nibbling away of which Count Lubonski had spoken so cavalierly; this was wholesale, callous, brutal dismembering of a great and Christian state. For no moral cause whatever, except a desire to crush a liberal nation whose leaders were charting new courses to freedom, Prussia and Russia had castrated Poland in defense of their Golden Freedom. All the good works of the years from 1772 to 1793 were scorned and discarded by outsiders before the insiders had a chance to make them function. It was one of the crudest destructions in history and one of the least warranted, the more remarkable in that no foreign state protested. A sovereign nation was raped while the trading nations loaded their ships and spoke of freedom of the seas, and religious leaders spoke of moral responsibility and justice.

  The more Bukowski studied the map, the deeper became his despair. Russia was taking a vast expanse from Vitebsk to Minsk, and Prussia was doing the same, from Poznan almost to the gates of Warsaw. ‘My God!’ Tytus cried when he saw the pitiful remnant, an elongated strip with no logical basis for existence. ‘How do they expect us to live?’ And he was so outraged that he stormed into the quarters where his improvised cavalry unit was berthed and persuaded a group of men like himself to make protest against this crime. They mounted their horses, brandished what informal weapons they could find, and started out at a slow canter to attack the Granicki palace, where the Prussian and Russian diplomats were meeting to refine the boundaries of the lands they were stealing. As they reached Senatorska, the wide avenue leading to the royal castle and the palace, they spurred their horses to a faster pace, but when the time came to leave Senatorska and head for the palace, a detachment of Prussian guards intercepted them, the German commander shouting: ‘Halt! It is forbidden!’

  Bukowski, in the lead, refused to slow his horse; instead he spurred it, so that he and the horse leaped right past the Germans, with others following.

  At this moment Baron von Eschl, hearing the disturbance, came to the front door of the palace, and comprehending immediately what was happening, he screamed in his high, quavering voice: ‘Fire on them!’ This brought the Prussian guards to their senses, and kneeling in the snow, they took aim and brought Bukowski down, four bullets through his back. When his horse stumbled, other horses fell, and there was a general massacre.

  When the fusillade stopped, all Polish horsemen having been gunned down, Von Eschl walked over to the commander and said: ‘You’d better shoot them all again. We need no heroes.’ And as he watched, the officer went to each of the prostrate bodies and put a bullet through the temple. No such coup de grâce was needed for Tytus Bukowski, for he had died at the first volley.

  As soon as Count Lubonski learned that his factotum had been killed in the disturbances attendant upon the Second Partition, he dispatched a messenger to the manor house at Bukowo with a request that the inheritor of the Bukowski estate report to him at once.

  Selecting one of the Arabian horses for which the manor was noted—and which kept it plagued by nagging debts—Feliks rode slowly south to Castle Gorka, where he presented himself to the count, who in this time of sorrow would be his adviser and in a sense his commander, for he still practically owned the Bukowskis and their estate.

  ‘Feliks!’ the count cried as he hurried forward to greet the young man. ‘I am saddened by news which has reached me from the north.’

  As he and his wife feared, the young man had already heard of the shooting and was distraught, and Countess Lubonska tried to console him: ‘Your father died a hero, and in a heroic cause.’ The count, hearing these dubious words, wanted to growl ‘He died a damned fool opposing the inevitable,’ but he kept his silence, for he liked young Bukowski and wanted him to adjust quickly to his loss.

  Feliks was twenty-two years old, and unlike most of the Bukowskis, was slight of build, blond-haired and generally attractive. He had a quick mind, a rarity in his rather stodgy family, and a keen interest in all things Polish, but in this tragic time he was obviously confused and not yet aware that he was now in charge of his family’s fortunes.

  ‘Sit down, Feliks, while I call my son,’ said the count as he poured the young man a glass of Hungarian wine. Lubonski, fiftysix years old and at the height of his considerable powers, fumbled among his papers while they were waiting, and when the tall young nobleman appeared, Lubonski cried: ‘Good! Now we can study the map.’

  ‘Why?’ Roman asked.

  ‘Because there’s a new world to be mastered … a new Poland to be understood … and because it’s needful that each of you find a wife.’

  Roman blushed. ‘I have not thought about a wife,’ he said, and his father snapped: ‘Young men rarely do … at least not in the right way.’ Then, unfurling a map, he added: ‘This time, though, we shall all go about it in the right way,’ and with the young men standing behind him he began to piece out the grand tour they would be starting three days from then. But before he indicated the first stop he looked up at them, smiled warmly, and said: ‘What we shall be doing, the three of us, is searching out the beautiful young ladies of Poland.’ Then he added almost sadly: ‘But of course, with the new changes, most of them won’t be in Poland any longer.’

  With long, delicate fingers, almost the hallmark of his family, he indicated a castle only a short distance to the north: ‘We’ll go first to Baranow of the Leszczynskis, one of our noblest families, then up to that troublesome spot, Pulawy, to see what the great Czartoryskis plan to do with what’s left of Poland, then over to my favorite city, Zamosc of the equally powerful Zamoyskis.’

  Here he lifted his hand from the map and asked the two young men to sit down while he addressed them. ‘It is important, it is crucially important, that you see and understand these two new families—Czartoryski, Zamoyski. They represent dangerous forces in our society against which you must protect both yourselves and the nation. They’re charming people. They’re able. And I am the first to admit that they’ve done some good things. But they represent a terrible threat to the welfare of Poland, and they must be opposed in whatever they attempt.’

  ‘Isn’t King Stanislaw August a Czartoryski?’ Roman asked.
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  ‘He is. His mother was sister to the two powerful brothers, so it’s a family to be reckoned with.’

  ‘Then why do you dislike them?’ his son asked.

  ‘Because they represent all that’s revolutionary … all that might destroy what’s left of the Golden Freedom that made Poland great.’

  He resumed his place at the map and summoned the young men to follow his finger as it roamed the immense eastern reaches of the nation: ‘From Zamosc we’ll drop down to Granicki’s castle. He has a daughter Katarzyna whom we must meet. And from there we’ll go far east of Lwow to our estates in the Ukraine, then back to the grandest of all, Lancut, where the great Lubomirska has invited us for six weeks in summer. That you will never forget. I believe she has a niece who seeks a husband, and if either of you can catch her, you will be fortunate indeed. Then the portion of the tour that excites me most, down to Dukla, where the Mniszechs have a glorious child, Elzbieta, who needs a husband, and over to Wisnicz, where the other Lubomirskis have two daughters awaiting us.’

  Placing his hands over the map as if the tour were already completed, he said: ‘I want you to accomplish three things on this trip. Study the new Poland to estimate its chances for survival. Study the old families to determine which of them will survive. And find yourselves wives. The countess has something to say on that matter,’ and with this he cleared the desk for her.

  ‘It is very important for each of you young men to find the right wife.’ Looking boldly at her son, she said: ‘Roman, you must find a girl who will help you at the court in Vienna. With the right wife, anything will be possible. Money you do not need, but as my father will assure you, for he’s never had any, it is never harmful. Feliks, you have a name and a fortune to make … an estate to build. Your family has reached a point where the next marriage will be crucial, and you must consider the matter most carefully.’