(^238) KONGRESOWKA
fortifications. Forty thousand men, dispersed along a wide horseshoe, were to
hold a line against almost twice their number. Some 95 horse-drawn cannon
were matched against the Russians' 390. The key position, in Redoubt No. 54
and the churchyard at Wola, was commanded by General Jan Sowinski
(1777—1831), a veteran of both the Prussian and Napoleonic armies, who had
lost a leg in Russia in 1812. The assault was launched at 4 a.m. on 6 September,
and lasted two full days. Paskievitch counted on the sheer weight of men and
metal to overwhelm suicidal bravery. Redoubt No. 54 was blown to pieces,
together with its defenders and attackers, when a desperate Polish hero put a
match to the powder store. In the churchyard at Wola, Sowinski's corpse, shred-
ded by bayonets, lolled against a gun-carriage, eerily erect on its wooden leg,
long after the tide of battle had flowed into the city centre. Warsaw capitulated
at midnight, 7-8 September, amidst the glare of burning suburbs, convoys of
refugees, and the recriminations of the General Staff. Krukowiecki and
Pradzyriski were taken into captivity.^13
In military terms, the Rising was far from defeated. Three separate army corps
were still in the field, with a total of 60,000 men at their disposal. Ramorino to the
east, Rozycki to the south, and Rybitiski entrenched in the great Napoleonic
fortress of Modlin, might well have stretched Russian resources to the full. But
the will to fight was broken. Once the heart of the Rising in Warsaw was pierced,
the limbs ceased to function. The ranks of the army melted away. The surviving
political leaders, like Czartoryski, fled to Galicia, or to Prussia. The last focus of
resistance at Zamosc surrendered on 21 October. From beginning to end, the
most tragic of Polish Risings had lasted just 325 days.
The tragedy of the November Rising lay in the fact that it was largely unnec-
essary. Unlike 1794 or 1863 or 1905, which were provoked by systematic oppres-
sion, the events of 1830— 1 were preceded by a period in which the main part of
the Polish nation had enjoyed greater freedoms than at any point during the
Partitions. The original conspirators acted without the approval of anyone
beyond their immediate circle, and without any conception of further develop-
ments. Given the slightest grain of understanding from the Tsarist government,
they would have been rounded up like any other band of amateur adventurers,
and their grievances attended to. Unfortunately, the total obduracy of the Tsar,
the absolute refusal to negotiate or compromise, the brutish insistence on
unconditional surrender from the start, turned a minor conspiracy into a major
conflict. In 1830, the Polish nation did not possess an unusual proportion of
'hotheads', 'troublemakers', or 'revolutionaries'. It did not display any innate
tendency to commit communal suicide. The extreme attitudes which came to
the surface in the course of the Rising were manufactured by a situation in
which reasonable men were denied the chance of behaving reasonably. It was
Nicholas I who turned even pjo-Russian conservatives like Adam Czartoryski
into active rebels. It was the Russian government which provoked the very reac-
tions it supposedly sought to avoid. It was Tsarism which fostered the negative
qualities of Polish nationalism.
jeff_l
(Jeff_L)
#1