Song of the Legions

by Michael Large

  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.

  “It's not a retreat, but a strategic withdrawal, as they say,” the Commander said wryly. “Be not alarmed, comrades, but a second Russian army approaches from the rear. They have crossed through neutral Austrian territory to get behind us.”

  The Commander primed the taper on the powder barrel with one of the fuses from his hat. He had a lit cigar in his mouth and with this he lit a hand grenade which he pitched over his shoulder at the advancing Russians, without a backward glance.

  Our horses were tied to a post near the opposite foot of that same hill, the hill that we were now relinquishing to our foes. None of our comrades had lingered, they had all ridden off, in accordance with the Commander's strict orders, which, in the circumstances, were naturally obeyed to the letter. We mounted our horses and set our spurs hard at their flanks. The horses ran like devils, their ears set along the sides of their heads, eyes bulging, foaming at their bits, sweat running down their flanks.

  At a good distance we paused and the Commander vaulted from his horse, cautioning us to do the same. He wrapped the reins twice around his fist and set his hat over the beast's eyes. Our abandoned and forsaken battlement was seething with curious Russians by now, hunting for trophies and souvenirs. They probed at the trenches and dugouts with bayonets and sabrepoints, like a dunghill of curious ants.

  “Let God have mercy on their souls!” the Commander said. The trench that we had lately vacated detonated in a great eruption of earth and noise. It was as if a meteorite had struck. My ears rang and my horse reared wildly – had I still been in the saddle, I should have been thrown a furlong up in the air. As it was, I found myself on my knees, with the Commander hauling me to my feet. His lips were moving, but all that I could hear was a great rushing noise in my ears, as if I were standing under a waterfall.

  No doubt inured to this concussion by a lifetime of such explosions, the Commander set me on my horse again and we rode off after the rest of the army. The Russian regiments around us were closing in, like the drawing of a noose, and it would not pay to tarry here, with naught but a mountain of corpses behind us.

  Presently, my ears ceased ringing, and I regained my wits. The Russians had left four thousand dead on that hill and their General had them buried post haste to conceal their number. Yet they could easily afford such a butcher's bill. The Commander informed us that about a hundred of our men had fallen, but, alas, we could ill afford even that. We would lose more in the days to come, from illness, injury, and desertion.

  However, for all that it appeared that by the Commander's prudent orders, we had ridden out of the trap in good time, and we would ride back to Warsaw. Our corps was tired and battered, but it was still a formidable body of men.

  “At Warsaw we rendezvous with the rest of the army, commanded by Poniatowski, and make our stand together there,” the Commander informed us tersely, as we broke our march to hurriedly scavenge fodder for our horses.

  The Russians had crossed into neutral Austrian territory to get behind us. We had been forced to retreat so that we would not be surrounded. In the smoking dusk our army rode back bloodied but unbeaten, with our muskets across our saddles, and our dusty standards furled. We were not like victors but a harried rearguard retreating across the plains, horses staggering, men slumped asleep in their saddles, pistols in hand, as the caissons and the wagons rattled in the ruts of the ruined roads.

  The unhappy day revealed the same flat barren countryside all about and the smoke from the fires of the night before stood thin and windless to the east. There was nowhere to hide beneath that cold unmerciful sky, nothing for it but to ride on to Warsaw. And the silver circle of the summer moon peered down, the winking eye of evil old Pan Twardowski who sat above us drooling and cackling at our fate.

  The grey dust of the enemy who were to hound us to the gates of the city of Warsaw seemed ever closer. We shambled on through the driving horizontal rain, and the vicious unrelenting Siberian winds, lashing our exhausted horses on. Swarms of Cossack riders were gathering at our rear like ravenous buzzing horseflies, settling on any stragglers. They were an endless and constant irritation, and did not allow us occasion for a single moment's respite. If challenged by our men in numbers, they would always fall back, wary as wolves, cowardly as jackals. They were always waiting behind the next rise or the last lonely copse of hanging trees.

  Midmorning we watered at a shallow ford that had already been walked through by our horses and pack animals, the riders dismounting to drink from their czapkas and then riding on again down the dry bed of the stream and clattering over the earth, the plains running to the horizon, thickly grassed and grown with barley and corn. At dusk we sent riders west to Warsaw for news of Poniatowski.

  At this ford the Commander set an ambuscade for the Cossack riders and we sat in the reed beds waiting for them with our czapkas doffed and our weapons wrapped in our cloaks lest the metal winking in the last rays of the evening sun betray us. We baited our trap with a string of hobbled horses and we did not wait long for the fish to bite, for the Cossacks greatly esteemed and coveted our fine Polish steeds.

  When the next band of Cossacks forded the stream we met them with a resounding volley. They fell to their deaths in those same waters. They wore ragged dirty garments and filthy beards to their waists. They were armed with immense lances such as our forefathers used to fight against the Teutonic Knights in olden days, with wheel-lock muskets, and with bows and arrows. Their bodies bobbed in the water like corks. We saw the lice and vermin jumping from them in search of new and warmer habitations.

  But no sooner had we dispatched these fellows, with the fresh gunsmoke still palling in the air, than another band of Cossacks appeared, greater still in number. This new warparty veered off, disdaining the gauntlet we had thrown for them. They did not come near us but rode down upon a small village or hamlet that lay nearby. We all knew what lay in store for the poor peasants of that village, for the men would all be slain, and the women raped and then slain. A few hotheads rode out after the Cossacks, and we knew they would not return.

  The Commander angrily cuffed to the ground a lieutenant of the cavalry who asked for permission to pursue the Cossacks with his squadron. The lieutenant took up his czapka and set it back on his head, wiped the dirt from his tunic, and sat his horse with tears running down his face. We rode off after the rest of the army, toward Warsaw, abandoning the already burning village to its fate.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ROAD TO WARSAW, AUGUST 1792

  On the road to Warsaw we met our comrades, Poniatowski's men. Our hearts rejoiced at the sight of the vanguard riding forward to meet us, the red and white swallow-tailed pennants on their lances dancing in the dusk. We were all angry, and we had all had enough of the Commander's fighting retreat.

  “We've licked these bastards twice, so why do we run?” Tanski roared. “Now Pepi is here we shall stand and fight these barbarians! We shall win or die!”

  Our spirits soared and we drained the last vodka in our canteens. At the sight of Pepi's horse we roared “Long live Poniatowski!”

  The Commander, saluting, ran to embrace his fellow general. But at the sight of our beloved Prince, our hearts sank. Pepi's face ran with tears of sorrow and disgrace. Neither death nor defeat coul
d have moved the Prince to such a state of despair. Something far worse had befallen us. A tremor ran through the army.

  “My dear General Poniatowski,” the Commander began. “What ails you? It is a fine day, is it not? Old Poland yet lives. Her armies are undefeated in the field. With our two forces united, we are outnumbered by a mere three to one by the Russians. I'll take those odds, by God!”

  Pepi saluted. “My dear Lord Brother, I bring orders from the King. To avoid further bloodshed, His Majesty has joined the Targowica Confederation and abolished the Constitution. Go back to your homes, comrades. The war is over.”

  The Commander shook his head in angry disbelief. “The Bullock jests, does he not? This is treachery, by God!” and he spat from the saddle, in front of the Prince. A dead hush descended, broken only by the fluttering of flags and the nervous sighs of the horses. The Commander gripped his sword. Very clearly and evenly, the anger boiling in his voice, he said, “I'll serve this King no more. He is a coward and a traitor, and this is high treason.” With that, Tadeusz Kosciuszko tore his general's epaulettes from his shoulders, and hurled his general's baton and all of his insignia of rank into the dust, and rode off.