Ogniem i mieczem. English

by Henryk Sienkiewicz

  EPILOGUE.

  But this tragedy of history was finished neither at Zborovo nor Zbaraj,and not even the first act of it. Two years later all Cossackdom rushedforth to do battle with the Commonwealth. Hmelnitski rose mightier thanever before; and with him marched the Khan of all the hordes, attendedby the same leaders who had fought at Zbaraj,--the wild Tugai Bey, UrumMurza, Artimgirei, Nureddin, Galga, Amurat, and Subahazi. Pillars offlame and groans of men went on before them; thousands of warriorscovered the fields, filled the forests; half a million of mouths sentforth shouts of war, and it seemed to men that the end of theCommonwealth had come.

  But the Commonwealth had risen from its lethargy, had broken with thepast policy of the chancellor, with treaties and negotiations. It wasseen at last that the sword alone could win enduring peace. When theking therefore marched against the hostile inundation, there went withhim an army of one hundred thousand soldiers and nobles, besideslegions of irregulars and attendants.

  No one living of the personages in the foregoing narrative was absent.Prince Yeremi Vishnyevetski was there with his whole division, in whichwere serving, as of old, Skshetuski and Volodyovski, with the volunteerZagloba; both hetmans, Pototski and Kalinovski, were there, ransomed atthat time from Tartar captivity. There were present also StephenCharnetski, later on the crusher of Karl Gustav, the Swedish king; PanPshiyemski, commander of all the artillery; General Ubald: PanArtsishevski; Marek Sobieski, starosta of Krasnostav, with his brother,Yan Sobieski, starosta of Yavorov, afterward King Yan III.; LudvikWeyher, voevoda of Pomorie; Yakob, voevoda of Marienburg;Konyetspolski, the standard-bearer; Prince Dominik Zaslavski; thebishops, the dignitaries of the Crown, the senators,--the wholeCommonwealth, with its supreme leader the king.

  On the fields of Berestechko those many legions met at last, and therewas fought one of the greatest battles of history,--a battle the echoesof which thundered through all contemporary Europe. It lasted for threedays. During the first two the fates wavered; on the third a generalengagement decided the victory.

  Prince Yeremi began that engagement; and he was seen in front of theentire left wing as, armorless and bareheaded, he swept like ahurricane over the field against those gigantic legions, formed of allthe mounted heroes of the Zaporojie, and all the Tartars,--Crimean,Nogai, and Belgorod,--of Silistrian and Rumelian Turks, Urumbalis,Janissaries, Serbs, Wallachians, Periotes, and other wild warriorsassembled from the Ural, the Caspian, and the swamps of Maeotis to theDanube. As a river vanishes from the eye in the foaming waves of thesea, so vanished from the eye the regiments of the prince in that seaof the enemy. A cloud of dust moved on the plain like a mad whirlwindand covered the combatants.

  The whole army and the king stood gazing on this superhuman struggle.Leshchinski, the vice-chancellor, raised aloft the wood of the HolyCross, and with it blessed the perishing.

  Meanwhile, on the other flank, the army of the king was approached bythe whole Cossack tabor, two hundred thousand strong, bristling withcannon, which vomited fire. It was like a dragon pushing slowly out ofthe woods his gigantic claws.

  But before the bulk of the enemy had issued from the dust in whichVishnyevetski's regiments had disappeared, horsemen began to drop awayfrom their ranks, then tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousandsof them, and rush to the height on which stood the Khan surrounded byhis chosen guard. The wild legions fled in mad panic and disorder,pursued by the Poles. Thousands of Cossacks and Tartars strewed thebattle-field; and among them lay, cut in two by a double-handed sword,the sworn enemy of the Poles but the trusty ally of the Cossacks, thewild and manful Tugai Bey.

  The terrible prince had triumphed.

  But the king looked with the eye of a leader on the triumph of theprince, and determined to break the hordes before the Cossacks couldcome up. All the forces moved, all the cannon thundered, scatteringdeath and disorder. Soon the brother of the Khan, the lordly Amurat,fell struck in the breast with a bullet. The hordes roared with pain.Wounded in the very beginning of the battle, the Khan looked on thefield with dismay. From the distance came Pshiyemski in the midst ofcannon and fire, and the king with the horse; from both flanks theearth thundered beneath the weight of the cavalry rushing to the fight.

  Then Islam Girei quivered, left the field, and fled; and after him fledin disorder all the hordes,--the Wallachians, the Urumbali, the mountedwarriors of the Zaporojie, the Silistrian Turks, and the renegades,--asa cloud before a whirlwind.

  The despairing Hmelnitski caught up with the fugitives, wishing toprevail on the Khan to return to the battle; but the Khan, bellowingwith rage at the sight of the hetman, ordered the Tartars to seize,bind him to a horse, and bear him away.

  Now there remained but the Cossack tabor. The leader of that tabor,colonel of Krapivna, Daidyalo, knew not what had happened toHmelnitski; but seeing the defeat and shameful flight of all thehordes, he stopped the advance, and pushing back with the tabor, haltedin the marshy forks of the Pleshova.

  Now a storm burst in the heavens, and measureless torrents of rainrushed down. "God was washing the land after a just battle." The rainlasted some days, and some days the armies of the king rested, weariedfrom struggles; during this time the tabor surrounded itself withramparts, and was changed into a gigantic movable fortress.

  With the return of fair weather began a siege, the most wonderful everseen in life. The hundred thousand warriors of the king besieged thetwice one hundred thousand Zaporojians. The king needed cannon,provisions, ammunition. The Zaporojians had immeasurable supplies ofpowder and all necessaries, and besides seventy cannon of heavier andlighter calibre. But at the head of the king's armies was the king, andthe Cossacks had not Hmelnitski. The armies of the king werestrengthened by a recent victory; the Cossacks were in doubt ofthemselves.

  Several days passed; hope of the return of Hmelnitski and the Khandisappeared. Then negotiations began. The Cossack colonels came to theking, and beat the forehead to him, asking for pardon; they visited thesenators' tents, seizing them by their garments, promising to getHmelnitski even from under the earth and deliver him to the king.

  The heart of Yan Kazimir was not opposed to forgiveness. He wished tolet the rabble return to their homes if all the officers weresurrendered; these he determined to keep till Hmelnitski should berendered up. But such an agreement was not to the mind of the officers,who, from the enormity of their offences, had no hope of forgiveness.Therefore in time of negotiations battles continued, desperate sallies,and every day Polish and Cossack blood flowed in abundance. TheCossacks fought in the daytime with bravery and the rage of despair;but at night whole clouds of them hung round the camp of the king,howling dismally for pardon.

  Daidyalo was inclined to compromise, and was willing to give his headas a sacrifice to the king, if he could only ransom the army and thepeople. But dissension rose in the Cossack camp. Some wished tosurrender, others to defend themselves to the death; but all werethinking how to escape from the tabor. To the boldest, however, thisseemed impossible. The tabor was surrounded by the forks of the riverand by immense swamps. Defence was possible for whole years, but toretreat only one road was open,--through the armies of the king. Ofthat road no one in the camp thought.

  Negotiations, interrupted by battles, dragged on lazily. Dissensionsamong the Cossacks became greater and more frequent. In one of theseDaidyalo was deposed from leadership, and a new man chosen. His namegave fresh strength to the fallen spirits of the Cossacks, and strikinga loud echo in the camp of the king, roused in some hearts forgottenmemories of past sorrows and misfortunes. The name of the new leaderwas Bogun. He had already occupied a lofty position among the Cossacksin council, and in action the general voice indicated him as thesuccessor of Hmelnitski.

  Bogun, foremost of the Cossack colonels, stood with the Tartars atBerestechko at the head of fifty thousand men. He took part in thethree days' cavalry fight, and defeated with the Khan and the hordes byYeremi, he succeeded in bringing out of the defeat the greater part
ofhis forces and finding shelter in the camp. Then after Daidyalo theparty opposed to conciliation gave him chief command, hoping that hewas the one man able to save the tabor and the army.

  In truth the young leader would not hear of negotiations. He wantedbattle and blood, even if he had to drown in that blood himself. Butsoon he saw that with his troops it was vain to think of passing witharmed hand over the bodies of the king's army. Therefore he graspedafter other means.

  History has preserved the memory of those matchless efforts which tocontemporaries seemed worthy of a giant, and which might have saved thearmy and the mob.

  Bogun determined to pass through the bottomless swamp of the Pleshova,and build over those quagmires a bridge of such make that all thebesieged might cross. Whole forests began then to fall under the axesof the Cossacks and sink in the swamp. Wagons, tents, coats, sheepskinswere thrown in, and the bridge extended day by day. It appeared thatthere was nothing impossible to that leader.

  The king deferred the assault, from aversion to bloodshed. But seeingthese gigantic works, he recognized that there was no other way, andordered the trumpets to sound in the evening for the final struggle.

  No one knew of that intention in the Cossack camp, and the bridgelengthened all night as before. In the morning Bogun went forth at thehead of the officers to examine the work.

  It was Monday, July 7, 1651. The morning of that day rose pale, as iffrom fright; the dawn was bloody in the east; the sun appeared, red,sickly; a sort of bloody reflection lighted the woods and forests. Fromthe Polish camp they were driving the horses to pasture; the Cossacktabor sounded with the voices of awakened men. Fires were lighted, themorning meal prepared. All saw the departure of Bogun, his retinue andthe cavalry going with him, by the aid of which he intended to driveaway the voevoda of Bratslav, who had occupied the rear of the taborand was injuring the Cossack works with his cannon.

  The crowd looked on the departure quietly, and even with hope in theirhearts. Thousands of eyes followed the young commander, and thousandsof mouths said: "God bless thee, my falcon!"

  The leader, the retinue, and the cavalry receded gradually from thetabor, came to the edge of the forest, glittered once more in the earlysunlight, and began to disappear in the thicket. Then some awful,terrified voice shouted, or rather howled, at the gate of the tabor:"Save yourselves, men!"

  "The officers are fleeing!" roared hundreds and thousands of voices.The roar passed through the crowd, as when a whirlwind strikes apine-wood; and then a terrible, unearthly cry burst forth from twohundred thousand throats: "Save yourselves! Save yourselves! The Poles!The officers are fleeing!" Masses of men rose at once, like a madtorrent. Fires were trodden out, wagons and tents overturned, palingsbroken to pieces, men trampled and suffocated. Piles of bodies barredthe road. They rushed over corpses, amidst howls, shouts, uproar,groans. Crowds poured from the square, burst on to the bridge, stuck inthe swamp; the drowning seized one another with convulsive embraces,and crying to heaven for mercy, sank in the cold moving swamp. On thebridge began a battle and slaughter for place. The waters of thePleshova were filled with bodies. The Nemesis of history took terriblepayment for Pilavtsi with Berestechko.

  The awful shouts came to the ears of the young leader, and he knew atonce what had happened. But in vain did he return at that moment to thetabor; in vain did he turn to meet the crowd with hands raised toheaven. His voice was lost in the roar of thousands. The terrible riverof fugitives bore him away, with his horse, his retinue, and all thecavalry, and carried him on to destruction.

  The armies of the king were amazed at the sight of this movement, whichsome mistook at first for a desperate attack. But it was difficult notto believe the eyes of all. A few moments later, when their amazementhad passed, all the regiments, without waiting even for command, rushedupon the enemy. First went like a whirlwind the dragoon regiment; inthe front of it Volodyovski, with sabre above his head.

  The day of vengeance, defeat, and judgment had come, Whoever was nottrampled or drowned went under the sword. The rivers were so filledwith blood, that it could not be told whether blood or water flowed inthem. The bewildered crowds, still more disordered, began to trampleand push one another into the water, and drown. Death filled thoseawful forests, and reigned in them the more terribly since strongdivisions began to defend themselves with rage. Battles were fought inthe swamp, on the stumps, in the field. The voevoda of Bratslav cut offretreat to the fugitives. In vain did the king give orders to restrainthe soldiers. Mercy had perished; and the slaughter lasted tillnight,--a slaughter such as the oldest warriors did not remember, andat the recollection of which the hair rose on their heads in latertimes.

  When at last darkness covered the earth, the victors themselves wereterrified at their work. No "Te Deum" was sung, and not tears of joy,but of regret and sorrow, flowed from the eyes of the king.

  So ended the first act in the drama of which Hmelnitski was the author.

  But Bogun did not lay down his head with others in that day of horror.Some say that, seeing the defeat, he was the first to save himself byflight; others, that a certain knight of his acquaintance saved him. Noone was able to reach the truth. This alone is certain, that insucceeding wars his name came out frequently among the names of themost noted leaders of the Cossacks. A shot from some vengeful handstruck him a few years later, but even then his last day did not come.After the death of Prince Vishnyevetski, from military toils, when thedomains of Lubni fell away from the body of the Commonwealth, Bogunobtained possession of the greater part of their area. It was said thatat last he would not recognize Hmelnitski over him. Hmelnitski himself,broken, cursed by his own people, sought aid from abroad; but thehaughty Bogun refused every guardianship, and was ready to defend hisCossack freedom with the sword.

  It was said, too, that a smile never appeared on the lips of thisstrange man. He lived not in Lubni, but in a village which he raisedfrom its ashes, and which was called Rozlogi.

  Intestine wars survived him, and continued for a long time; then camethe plague and the Swedes. The Tartars were almost continual visitorsin the Ukraine, carrying legions of people into captivity. TheCommonwealth became a desert; a desert the Ukraine. Wolves howled onthe ruins of former towns, and a land once flourishing became a mightygraveyard. Hatred grew into the hearts and poisoned the blood ofbrothers.