Poland

by James A. Michener

  But during the next week excitement in Warsaw grew, especially when one of Kosciuszko’s personal lieutenants slipped into the city to enlist volunteers in what he described as ‘our great crusade.’ Feliks was inclined to join those who that day started to move south, but as a new husband with the responsibility of introducing his bride to her country home at Bukowo, he felt an obligation to return south with Count Lubonski rather than with the revolutionaries, and on the long ride home when he asked the count what he thought of men like Kosciuszko, the answer was: ‘A man of good family, but a renegade. Picked up rotten ideas in America and especially France. Poland, no matter how it splits, will always be a country of peasants down there and magnates up here, and if you apply your new money wisely, Feliks, you can become a magnate one of these days … not soon, but quite possibly.’

  ‘What will happen to Kosciuszko?’

  ‘Forget that name! He’s a flash. He’ll march out of Krakow, and if the Russians don’t destroy him, the Prussians will.’

  ‘His people think the Prussians will rush to aid him.’

  Lubonski broke into laughter. ‘How ridiculous can you get, Feliks? It’s Prussia that’s determined to annihilate us.’ He paused.

  ‘And maybe with good cause. Maybe it will be better for us all when Poland quietly vanishes.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Feliks asked in obvious astonishment.

  ‘Of course! Feliks, don’t you see that with your new funds, Warsaw is your enemy! It’s Warsaw that talks about liberties for the peasants … land for the townspeople … seats in the Seym for Jews, even … Once we allow that festering sore to be eradicated, Russia and Austria and Prussia will surely protect interests like yours and mine.’

  When Feliks started to ask: ‘But is there not a general sense of—’ Lubonski halted him: ‘I’ll tell you what the general sense is—revolution. And it has got to be stamped out. Men like you and me will soon be fighting against Kosciuszko, not for him.’

  On the second of April 1794, word reached Bukowo that General Kosciuszko—he held that title in the armies of three nations: France, America, Poland—had marched from Krakow at the head of two battalions and twelve heavy guns, and on the very next day Jan of the Beech Trees rushed into the manor house, where Eulalia was beginning to supervise things, with even more disturbing news: ‘General Tormasov of Russia is marching with a big army toward Raclawice just across the Vistula.’ And on the fifth of April messengers sweating with excitement crossed the river: ‘Kosciuszko has won a great victory. Routed the Russians completely.’

  Now the contrast between Count Lubonski, defender of the old freedoms, and his liege Bukowski, aspirer toward the new, became irreconcilable, because the former summoned his private army to support the Russians, while the latter, attended by his peasant Buk, opted to join Kosciuszko, and though neither Lubonski nor Bukowski would have fired upon the other personally, each considered the other a traitor to Poland’s cause and hoped that the traitor’s side would perish.

  In a small boat Feliks and Jan poled themselves across the river on 6 May 1794, the master armed with two guns, the serf with a mowing scythe and a length of metal-studded ash tree. When they landed on the far shore, they were greeted with exciting news: ‘General Kosciuszko himself is going to meet with us.’

  ‘Where?’ Feliks asked.

  ‘Here at Polaniec,’ the men said, and they were correct.

  One of the crucial events in Polish history was destined to occur only a few miles from Bukowo at the ancient market village of Polaniec, and all that night patriots discussed the first great victory at Raclawice and those still to come as the Russian forces of General Tormasov and his Polish allies—among them, Count Lubonski—were driven out of both old Poland and the territories stolen in the two partitions. It was a night glowing with the sparks of triumph, but it did not compare with what was to happen on the following day.

  It was about a mile from the riverbank, near which the men had camped, to the tree-lined field where the general was to meet a large assembly of local citizens, hoping to enroll them in his crusade; he was especially eager to entice men of substance like Bukowski from the Austrian territories, and all that morning little boats from the occupied zone slipped across the river bringing new conscripts to the cause.

  Symbolically, Feliks and Jan, master and serf, walked together up the gentle hill from the river and along the beautiful country road leading to Polaniec, joining a growing crowd, each man armed in his own peculiar way but most with scythes, which they were prepared to use against Russian guns. They came at last to the field, where several thousand irregular troops, themselves variously armed, marshaled the newcomers into orderly units well scattered over the area.

  At noon a wild shout of victory arose from the troops, for Kosciuszko himself was coming up the slight rise, and what caused the shouting was the fact that he was wearing, for the first time in this campaign, the heavy white felted peasant’s jacket popular in Krakow. ‘He’s one of us,’ shouted the men with scythes, and the orderliness which the troops had tried to enforce broke down as men from everywhere rushed forward to greet their hero.

  Forty-eight and in the glory years of his life, he looked a veritable hero. Not tall, not robust, he was spiritually commanding, a handsome, compact man with an almost angelic clean-shaven face framed in copious hair which came to his shoulders. He wore his usual uniform with the air of a patrician, which he was, and his peasant’s cloak with an easy informality that made him one of the people. Most of all, he was a leader, for when the rest of Poland lay sunk in chaos, betrayal and despair, he alone had stepped forward with a promise that the nation could be freed, and with his early victories against almost insuperable odds, had proved his claim to the spot prepared for him. Without dismounting, he launched into his oration:

  ‘Men of Poland! With few, we proved that we can triumph and bring real freedom to our imperiled land. With many, we shall drive the invaders from our fields, reunite our severed parts, and establish a new nation founded on justice.

  ‘I speak especially to you men with scythes and clubs who fought as your ancestors did against the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald. When victory comes, you are to know a freedom you have never known before, and as of this moment your liberation begins.

  ‘Peasants of Poland, you are free! Peasants of Poland, you have all the rights other men have, and I shall name them. The land you have worked so faithfully can never be taken away from you by your landlord. The forests you have tended shall be your forests too, and everything that grows therein you, too, shall share, the wood and rabbits and the deer. The days of labor which you have given your magnates and gentry shall be diminished by three-quarters. Where last year you worked eight months for them, you shall now work two.

  ‘We form a new partnership in Poland, and we form it now, the master and the peasant side by side, rejoicing in new freedoms, new liberties for all.’

  The proclamation was so sensational that it sent shivers up men’s spines and giddiness to their heads; few of Kosciuszko’s listeners could assimilate it entirely, but one landholder, who stood to lose much under the new rules, cried with remarkable insight: ‘Hooray! France and America have come to Poland!’ And the air was filled with waving scythes.

  From his horse, General Kosciuszko reached out and grabbed one of the scythes and demonstrated how it was to be used in battle: ‘From the most ancient times farmers have used the scythe to mow their grain. Look, it forms a letter L, long handle, short cutting edge. If you carry it into battle that way, nothing can be achieved, because the Russians aren’t going to stand there waiting for you to come close and cut them down.’ Men who had already been in battle laughed. ‘No! What you must do is this.’ And deftly he untied the little ropes which bound the blade to the haft, then retied them in a way to hold the long, sharp blade as a forward extension of the handle, transforming it into a pike eight or nine feet long. Stabbing and jabbing with his new weapon, Kosciuszko cried: ‘The weapon
of freedom.’ Then, touching his peasant’s cloak, he added: ‘The uniform of freedom!’ and his rude army bellowed its approval.

  Bukowski and his serf Jan did not return home; they were caught up in the frenzy and would remain so for the duration of this amazing effort. They marched with Kosciuszko toward a small town west of Sandomierz where a Russian detachment was garrisoned, and with the scythe-men rushing forward, impervious to gunfire and the roar of cannon, they overwhelmed the enemy. In this battle, which lasted only forty minutes, Feliks captured two fine Russian horses, and thinking to reestablish the old tradition, he took one to Jan of the Beech Trees, saying: ‘Jan, hold this for me in case I need him in battle,’ and to his astonishment, Jan said: ‘I fight on my own, and you on your own,’ and he would not tend his master’s horse as his ancestors had faithfully done for seven centuries. Feliks solved the problem by finding a young lad to serve as his squire, but now he had to pay money for this service.

  Some of the gentry were outraged by Kosciuszko’s revolutionary idea that peasants could be set free, and after they experienced the kind of rebellion which Feliks had seen with Jan, they muttered protests: ‘This can never work in Poland. Peasants are born to serve, and the harder they work for us, the more content they are.’

  ‘They’re cattle, really,’ one landowner said.

  ‘I did not say that,’ a protestor said. ‘I asked Bishop Proszynski about that very topic, and he told me firmly: “The peasant has a soul. He is a real human being, but he was born to work and needs no alphabet or books.” Kosciuszko is terribly wrong in thinking he can give them freedom.’

  Some of the disenchanted asked to speak with the general, who kept himself open to all, and after he had listened to their complaint that Polish peasants were different from French or American, he said firmly: ‘I have been forced to travel much. I’ve seen many lands. And I’ve learned one thing. All men are alike in the eyes of God. All are entitled to the same freedoms.’

  ‘But the Polish peasant

  ‘Is exactly the same as the French peasant, who is exactly the same as the French nobleman.’

  ‘Could the French peasant appreciate a good wine?’

  ‘I have seen them do so … when they invaded the master’s cellars with guns and torches.’

  ‘Aren’t you preaching revolution against the gentry?’

  ‘I am trying to avoid revolution against the gentry. Come my way, dear friends, and you will save Poland. You’ll create a much better society, believe me.’

  The more Feliks saw of Kosciuszko, the more he admired him.

  ‘This man is all of one piece,’ he told the dissidents. ‘He treats his horse with the same respect he treats me, and I’ve seen him treat my peasant Jan with the same respect he treats his horse. And he can laugh at himself.’

  One night at the campfire before a morning battle with a Russian army, Kosciuszko sat with his cavalrymen, smoke from the embers wreathing his handsome head.’I knew a lot of trouble with General Washington, maybe the best man on earth these days. He made fun of my name, said no one could pronounce it or even remember it. Recommended that I change it to Kook. I grew angry and told him: “Look here, General, my name has the same number of letters as yours, and the same number of syllables, too. It’s Koshchoosh′-ko, and anyone with an education ought to be able to say that,” but he continued to pronounce it in four syllables Koss-eee-you′-sko and sometimes even Ko-shun′-ko, so I stopped trying to educate him.’

  ‘Was he a good general?’ Feliks asked.

  ‘He was a lucky one, and that’s even better.’

  ‘How, lucky?’

  ‘About fifteen times when I served with him the English could have killed us dead had they attacked at the moment. Always they hesitated, allowed us to regroup, or bring up reinforcements, and I call that luck.’

  ‘May the same luck attend us,’ an older man said, and Kosciuszko replied: ‘It is for that we pray.’

  During one waiting period, when it looked as if the rebels were going to drive the Russians clear out of all the Polands, old and new, Feliks and Jan slipped away, crossed the Vistula, and sneaked back into their homes, where Feliks saw with amazement the many good things that Eulalia had done in his absence, and he noticed that when his wife was dressed as a rural housewife rather than as a Warsaw belle, she could be quite handsome, the kind of woman Princess Lubomirska must have been when King Stanislaw August, the young Poniatowski, rejected her. It was rewarding to talk with her, for she loved to explain in detail what exactly she had been doing: ‘I decided that the stables should have windows, and in the village I found this man with remarkable skills as a carpenter, so I paid him to—’

  ‘You paid him?’

  ‘Yes. Your general’s proclamation at Polaniec reached here and the peasants believe they are free.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I see no great problem, Feliks. We pay them a little. They work harder. We earn more. And everybody’s better off.’

  She was still, as Lubomirska had so harshly described her: ‘fat and red and positively oafish,’ but she was also pregnant, and this gave her an appealing dignity, and since her father had supervised her education, she had accumulated ideas from the books in three languages which she had brought with her to the manor house. Eulalia Bukowska was exciting to be with, for she had already adjusted to the new world that was coming and saw a score of ways by which she could use it to her husband’s advantage.

  ‘Win the battles and hurry home,’ she told Feliks as he prepared to rejoin Kosciuszko for the inevitable confrontation with the Russians at the gates of Warsaw, but before that crucial battle could be joined, a Russian general of supreme talent arrived in Poland to replace all those who had allowed Kosciuszko to outsmart them. He was Aleksandr Vasilievich Suvorov, a scrawny, ill-tempered sixty-five-year-old military genius who had spent half his life battling the enemies of Catherine the Great on distant fields and half-battling the Russian establishment, which despised him for his unorthodox behavior. He was a remorseless adversary, and when he appeared on the scene the Russian backbone stiffened.

  The showdown battle occurred at the village of Maciejowice, some distance south of Warsaw, and in the early stages Kosciuszko’s extremely brave peasants with their scythes created their customary havoc with the Russian lines, wave after wave of pike-wielding serfs simply smothering the czarina’s troops, but in the end the discipline of a professional army tipped the balance. In one cruel charge—three hundred Polish peasants armed only with clubs against eight hundred Russian riflemen—Jan of the Beech Trees was shot four times through the chest and head, his dream of freedom ending on a grassy mound.

  Kosciuszko, wounded, was captured and taken to a Russian prison, but he had encouraged some of the younger officers to escape northward to oppose Suvorov in his attack upon Warsaw. Feliks Bukowski was one of these, and in October, when the first snows were already falling, he slipped into the city, riding one horse and leading another. As he went down Krakow Suburb and turned into Senatorska, thinking to announce himself to Lubomirska, he saw Miodowa, the Street of Sweet Nectar, and turned abruptly into it, riding slowly toward the Palais Princesse, where his beloved lived in her little marble mansion.

  He reined in his mount, and for some minutes stood quietly, his two horses gladly resting from their long march, and after a while children gathered, asking him about the battles, and he told them that General Kosciuszko was lost and that the battle for freedom was imperiled. They asked him where he had got his horses, and he explained that they had been captured from the Russians. They wanted to know the horses’ names, and he told them ‘Czar and Czarina,’ and one little boy yelled ‘They’re both men horses,’ and he said ‘I must have the names wrong.’

  The noise in the street attracted attention from within the marble palais, and a stern footman appeared to caution silence: ‘The young mistress is gravely ill and deserves quiet.’

  ‘Who? Who?’ Feliks cried.

  ‘Pani Lub
onska, the Mniszech mistress,’ the footman said. ‘She delivered her son and he does well, but she herself is endangered.’

  Feliks leaped from his horse, throwing the reins to the boy who had noticed that both horses were male, and shouted: ‘I must see her.’

  ‘That you cannot do,’ the footman protested, and when Feliks brushed past him, dashing toward the door, the footman began to bellow, making far more noise than the one he came to silence: ‘Master! Master!’

  At the entrance to the palais, Roman Lubonski intercepted him: ‘Feliks! From where?’

  ‘From the battlefield. Kosciuszko’s lost.’

  ‘I expected that,’ the young nobleman said; he had not joined his father’s army opposing the revolution, but spiritually he had supported the Russians, and was pleased to know that the rebels had suffered a major defeat.

  ‘I want to see Elzbieta,’ Feliks said, at which Roman began to weep: ‘You cannot. Not even I am allowed …’

  ‘Is she so ill?’

  ‘Gravely.’ And Roman retreated into the palais, closing the door behind him and shutting Feliks, his companion of many years, off from any contact.

  For two days Feliks stood watch in Miodowa; he slept spasmodically at Lubomirska’s palace, talking with her in brief interchanges and learning that she reveled in the approach of Suvorov and the imminent termination of Poniatowski’s kingship. Once Feliks said: ‘The poor king, Suvorov attacking him from the outside, you trying to bring him down from the inside.’ She replied: ‘He surrendered his crown the moment it was placed on his noble brow, for it did not fit. He had no concept of what it signified. And his cowardice before Catherine disqualified him. It has been thirty years of unceasing surrender and it’s time we terminated it.’