Song of the Legions (8 page)

Only the front rank of the cavalry carried the lance, together with a pair of pistols. The second and third ranks, following behind, carried a musket into battle at the charge instead. I myself was relegated to the second rank, to make use of my English gun, for we were sorely short of firearms. Thus I arrived moments after this first great wave of devastation, and the front rank were already chasing the retreating Russian cavalry from the field.

Beside me were Russians, wounded, in a heap, burning, trying with their sabres to slash the legs of our horses. I realised then how fanatical and determined were our foes. Ahead, a distinguished boyar with a fine long beard was brandishing their Russian flag, sabre in hand, his reins tied around his wrist. A great slick of bloody foam ran from his horse’s mouth. The boyar was trying to rally his regiment. They were in full flight from the field, to his great disgust and shame. He was bawling obscenities at the backs of his retreating comrades.

At the sight of this insolent invader I was overcome with anger. Bringing my steed to the gallop I broke out like lightning from the ranks and joined battle with this audacious boyar. With a lucky shot from my musket I knocked him from the saddle. He fell from his mount still clutching the flag, which trailed behind him in the mud. I had merely wounded him. He sat on the trampled grass, his long white beard running with blood, his sabre across his knees, wheezing for breath like an old grandad. Naturally I assumed that he wished to surrender, and, as an honourable man, accordingly extended my hand to accept his sword and flag.

I had underestimated him. The boyar jumped to his feet and lunged at my horse with his sabre. Cursing, I reined to one side to avoid these blows, and the boyar's sabre glanced wide. Furious, I slashed at him with my sabre, and fetched him a good downward cut.

He fell to the ground still clutching the flag.

Gasping with the exertion, I sat heavily back in my stirrups, and gulped down a good breath. Then and only then I took stock of the situation. Precisely no one had paid the slightest heed to this inept and bloody single combat, being much too preoccupied with their own pressing concerns. Blood ran from the boyar’s wounded head.

But even then, the old boyar came back at me. He was on hands and knees, barely even moving now, wracked with exhaustion and sorely wounded. Sickened, I wiped the sweat and blood from my face and dismounted, in order to capture the flag. Suitably angered, and in no mood for any fresh treachery, I marched up to him and drew both my pistols. We were at point blank range.

“Now then, your lordship. Surrender that flag, and I will spare your life,” I said firmly, “no sense in dying for a length of cloth, now, is there?”

Neither I spoke any Russian nor he any Polish, but our mother tongues are so very similar, that we could make ourselves plainly understood. Besides that I trusted in the eloquence of my pistols.

“Over my dead body, Lachy!” retorted the boyar, in peremptory tones. He was an aristocratic sort, hewn from Siberian rock, hardened by winters and vodka. This was madness. I frowned, and brandished my pistols again, and he merely smiled, trying to raise his sword in challenge. A religious medallion glinted at his neck. He clutched his Russian flag white fingered with his other hand. A hand that now shook, with fear or cold, I could not tell.

We both glanced at this battle flag, a blue flag streaked with mud, with a black eagle inlaid in gold emblazoned upon it. The double-headed eagle of the Tsars, a hideous, mythical beast. I thought of the horses transfixed by our pennants, hypnotised like rats before snakes. I turned back to the boyar.

“The flag, sir, or you die,” I said, as I took aim with a shaking hand.

“My death matters not, Lachy,” he shrugged, “
U nas mnogo ludei – We have a lot of people!”
With a last dying effort he made to run me through with his blade. I fired, and the ball entered his chest three inches below the religious medal, piercing his heart, killing him instantly.

Some hours after that, their right wing collapsed, and we took the flag from the dead boyar's hand and sent it back to Warsaw. But we could not dislodge the Russian infantry, try as we might, and we were in want of ammunition and food, as ever. As the evening darkness fell, we stole away like hunted wolves in the night. We followed the captured flag, and retreated back towards Warsaw.

This left General Morkov, the one Russian General who had deigned to actually turn up that day, in possession of an empty field strewn with corpses. Including, among their number, the bearded boyar, stretched out and growing cold on the ground.

Thus we fell back, and retreated towards Warsaw. It was a fighting retreat. On the way, the Commander had decided to make a stand at a place called Dubienka. For my part in taking the flag, Pepi rewarded me with a galloper’s errand. Leaving my regiment behind, I rode hard across country with a bundle of papers and orders. I arrived at the Commander’s headquarters filthy and spattered with mud. It did not matter, for the headquarters themselves apparently consisted of a huge dirty hole in the ground. Or as the engineers have it, a trench.

“Dispatches from General Poniatowski, Sir!” I cried.

The Commander glanced up from his desk, which was a plank across two barrels, before reluctantly putting down the book he was reading. I handed over the leather wallets, clicked my heels and saluted smartly, and then stared at this legendary man with a mixture of awe and fear. General Tadeusz Andrzej Bonaventure
Kosciuszko.
Second string to Pepi he may have been at that time, but to us,
Kosciuszko
was simply ‘The Commander’. And he always will be.

When I met him at Dubienka he was about forty-five years old, and already a legend, for his feats both on the battlefield (where he enjoyed great success) and in the boudoir (where he did not). Though a gentleman, the Commander was from a humble background. His family had little money, but his prodigious talents were recognised in him as a student. He was educated abroad, at the expense of the King, to study artillery, engineering, naval tactics, and, somewhat improbably, fine arts.

Upon his return, the Commander became tutor of the youngest daughter of the Grand Hetman, the lady Ludwika Sossonowski, with whom he fell in love. Having no hope of ever obtaining her father's permission, the lovers determined to elope together, for the Commander was not a man to be served black soup
^[2]
by anyone. He crept into the house in the dead of night, but was taken by surprise by Ludwika's father's guards. A combat ensued. After fighting like a lion, the Commander was flung out into the street, covered with wounds, half dead. So much for marriage!

His next amour, it was equally well known, went much the way of the first, but with fewer deaths. After this second desperate faux pas, determining that discretion is the better part of valour, the Commander volunteered to fight for the colonists in the American War. There he built the fortress at West Point, fought in numerous battles, won a great and eternal victory for liberty, and suffered not so much as a scratch in the process. Clearly, his engagements in battle with the English were less hazardous than his engagements to the daughters of our Polish nobility.

It was said that the first paramour, Ludwika – now married, and a Princess, if you please – still burned for the old warrior, and had connived at court to arrange his career and promotion for him. Naturally I set no store by such idle gossip where my hero was concerned.

The Commander was a tall, fiery man, with strong handsome features, a great lion’s mane of dark hair, dark eyebrows, wide, intelligent eyes, and a full fleshy nose. He wore a brilliant white waistcoat and a high-collared shirt. A dark red cravat was gathered at his throat and from it hung the Order of Cincinnatus, awarded to him by George Washington.

I had caught him in the middle of his lunch. A wooden board set across upturned barrels served for a desk and a table. On the board were water, vodka, cold veal, cucumbers, cold boiled eggs, and a pitcher of those cold beet soups of which the Lithuanians are so fond. I stood to attention, my bones aching from the ride. The Commander began leafing through the dispatches. He glanced up at me.

“Sit down, Comrade! Your regiment is following you here, so there is no need for you to go anywhere. All roads lead to Rome, as the proverb says! Sit, boy, take a glass, and eat. That's an order. For we are not going anywhere, and neither are they.”

The Commander nodded casually over his shoulder, beyond the fortifications, to the river, where the Russians sat on the opposite bank. Twenty thousand of them faced four thousand of us.

I propped my musket against a wall and fell upon the food like a hungry dog. The soup was chlodnik, a cold, uncooked soup, slightly sour in a pleasant way and refreshing, made of fermented beet juice and finely grated raw beets. Perfect chlodnik is served with the cooked shelled tails of crayfish, although the Commander had none, a lack which he cursed vociferously.

As I ate, the Commander read the rest of Pepi's dispatch, unconcernedly, and lit his clay pipe from a fire burning in a brazier. When he had finished, and committed the dispatches to memory, he tossed them into the blaze and returned to his book. I had been desperate to know what the Commander had been reading whence I had interrupted him. Summoning all my courage, I asked him.

“Virgil – the Aeneid,” he replied, gruffly. “What of it?”

The Commander had been reading the old Roman bugger's poem, rather than poring over the latest French artillery manual, or Marshall Maurice de Saxe's treatise on war, a copy of which I had myself.

It transpired we were both great readers, and each carted great stacks of books about with us on campaign, to fill the long empty hours encamped. Their subject was invariably war. It may appear odd that we should have spent our days and years at the wars, and then, for our leisure pursuits, buried our noses in books on the same subject. Yet, what could be more natural, than for a tradesman to read of his trade?

“So you know your classics. Excellent – exactly as a gentleman should. Have you heard of the Roman Cincinnatus?” The Commander touched the medal at his throat.

“Naturally,” I replied. “After defeating Rome's enemies, the general retired to his farm, to the plough, the simple life of a country squire. But when a new plague of barbarians threatened Rome, the Roman Emperor called him back from retirement, to fight again.”

The Commander roared with bitter laughter and slammed his great fist on the table. The food leapt into the air, then fell back again, the vodka bottle shaking perilously on its axis. The Commander stared at it as if to still it by sheer force of will, and it obeyed. One did not meddle with the man.

“George Washington has a grand sense of humour. For he awarded me this medal, and I retired to my farm, and my plough. Ha! Come see my fields! See my harvest!”

The Commander sprang from the trench and strode across the hillside. I snatched up my gun and followed where he led.
The rude hill of Dubienka had been fashioned into a makeshift fortress. A line of wooden spikes traversed it like the spines of a porcupine, behind which soldiers crouched in hastily dug, shallow muddy trenches. Those few cannon we could muster had been dug in behind gabions, which was what the engineers called wooden boxes or wicker baskets filled with earth and stones. This was the Commander's creation, or, at least, the creation of his engineers, who numbered amongst them one Sierawski of Krakow.

In war, as in life, natural causes, outside our control, do much, the Commander explained. The great tacticians of any campaign are hills and forests, which you must be skilful enough to select for your encampments. Our defensive line was on the western side of the River Bug, with the Russians on the east. Our fortifications ran between the river and the Austrian border, stretching like a chain. In front of us there was a swamp, through which the Russians must pass before they could attack us. They would be obliged to wade through the river, and then the swamp, under our fire.

“It isn't much of a field for cavalry,” I complained.

“You cavalrymen and your damned horses!” the Commander chided me. “Fie, boy! War is a serious business, not a sport for gentlemen.” He pointed across the river at the Russians. “Do you think you can defeat that endless tide of fanatical soldiery with chivalry and piddling wooden lances? Cavalry wins battles, but it is the infantry that wins wars.”

As we picked our way across this strange garden of death, I realised with horror that the Republic ended beyond the muzzle of my gun.

I had anticipated that we were on some vital errand at the edge of the Bug, the very edge of the frontline, the precipice. I had thought we were there to scout out the Russian positions, set the fuse on a powder mine, or take a few prisoners. Instead, the Commander searched about in the reeds until he found a small net secured there in the water. Trapped in it was a clutch of shrimp-like crabs, crayfish, like little knights in their black armoured shells, snapping their tiny claws.

Back in the trench, we roasted the crayfish over the embers of Pepi's dispatches. Their shells slowly turned from black to pink, and their sliced and skewered bodies butterflied open. The Commander smiled, dipping the hot fish in the cold beet soup. “Perfect chlodnik!”

As the Commander had said, I did not need to rejoin my regiment, they followed me to Dubienka to reinforce the Commander’s men. There we had a fine battle with the Russians, who waded through the river, and the swamp, to fight us. We shot them down in droves as they came.

Despite his genius as a sapper, the Commander's fortifications could not hold out against wave after wave of Russian attacks. On they came, rank after rank of grey uniforms, as he predicted they would. There were bearded moujiks and peasants waving religious icons, and there were boyars in gold epaulettes that ran down their arms from their shoulders to their wrists, and dismounted cavalrymen dragging their horses through the mire.

As the Russians say, ‘we have a lot of people.’ Men from every nation of the Russian empire seemed to be charging across that ford, as alien to each other as we were to them. Men from the steppes, men from beyond the Urals, from Georgia, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Tartary, and Samarkand, and the Cossacks, tribe upon tribe of them, advancing upon us across that humble ford. Suvarov's golden horde. It was as if we were fighting the workmen of the Tower of Babel. The ground was covered with grey coated dead, men from a dozen nations of an empire that enslaved half the world.

“The worst of this,” I said to Tanski, as we reloaded our muskets, “is that the Tsarina sends all of her enemies to do her fighting – you know what I mean, the moaners and the malcontents. Rich magnates whose estates she wants to steal. Old boyars who grumble about her antics in the bedroom. Nobles who want a say in the government. Peasants who won't pay their taxes. Divide and conquer. Thus the cunning old whore kills two birds with one stone. Or rather, we kill them for her.”

Tanski pulled the trigger and the bullet flew through the bejewelled eye of an icon of the Virgin Mary. This painting was being carried into battle by a Russian soldier. It was a strange sight, to see him carrying this beautiful icon that would have graced any altar. It was their battle flag. This standard bearer could not have been more appalled if the bullet had pierced his own eye. After a short, shocked, pause, his brigade began storming towards us, with redoubled efforts, waving their sabres and bayonets and howling fanatically.

“What the Devil are you doing, you fool?” we roared at Tanski, “Shooting at the Blessed Virgin? You've really done it this time!”

Tanski had turned pale with mortified embarrassment. “It's these damned French muskets, Blumer, you couldn't hit a barn door with them! Lousy peashooters!”

“Save it for confession,” the Commander roared, grabbing him by the collar and hurling him bodily out of the trench. “We are retiring from the field. Sierawski – the powder!”

The Commander had a bunch of lit fuses stuck in the brim of his hat and the smoke was billowing around his head, so that he appeared to be the very devil. At the sight of him, soldiers on both sides fell back in a panic. He waded through us, chasing us out of the trench. Behind us, our trumpets were sounding the retreat. We rolled a precious barrel of gunpowder out of the dugout. We had so few, gunpowder was like gold dust.