Madalinski, who hastened to offer himself as a volunteer. They attacked a Russian battery, spiked the cannon and cut the gunners to pieces. Again and again Dombrowski, who was later to lead the Polish Napoleonic legions, and whose name stands at the head of the famous patriotic song so beloved of Poland, would at Kościuszko's laconic order, "Harass the enemy," sally forth on some daring expedition. Or we hear of a sixteen hours' battle, the Poles, under a terrific fire, successfully driving the Prussians from height to height, Kościuszko himself commanding Kilinski's burgher regiment. No shirkers were to be found in Warsaw. Under the fearful Prussian bombardment the citizens coolly put out the fires, and the children ran into the streets to pick up the spent balls and take them to the arsenal, receiving a few pence for each one that they brought in. Once as Kościuszko and Niemcewicz stood on the ramparts with cannon-balls pattering about them, Niemcewicz heard a voice shouting into his ear through the din: "You are coming to supper with me, aren't you?"[1] The host who had the presence of mind to arrange a party under these circumstances was the President of Warsaw.
Even those who will not allow that Kościuszko was a military commander of the first capacity acknowledge that the defence of Warsaw was a magnificent feat. He was its life and soul. Organizing, encouraging, seeing into the closest details, the somewhat small but strongly built figure of the commander, clad in the peasant sukman worn, after his example, by all his staff, including the "citizen General Poniatowski," was to be met with at every
- ↑ J. Niemcewicz, Recollections of My Times.
