numbers through Volhynia and Podolia. During all these weeks of desperate fighting Kościuszko figures as the man whose bravery and skill again and again saved the critical moment. In his dispatches to the King, whose arrival in the Polish camp was daily looked for, and who never came, Poniatowski praises Kościuszko as "doing great service, not only by his courage, but also by his singular prudence." At Włodzimierz, when the Polish army was in the utmost danger of annihilation, Kościuszko thrust back the attack of "the whole Russian army"—the quotation is his—with heavy; loss to the Russians and little to the Poles. It was, thus Poniatowski declares in his report to the King, thanks "to the good and circumspect dispositions of General Kościuszko that our retreat was continued in unbroken order." The subsequent safe passage of the army over the river is again ascribed to Kościuszko. And so we arrive at the famous day of Dubienka, fought on the banks of the Bug between the marshes of Polesie and Galicia, which covered Kościuszko's name with glory, and which by tragic paradox saw the end of that stage of his nation's hope for freedom.
Kościuszko has left a manuscript account, written in the nature of a rough sketch, of the Ukraine campaign.[1] It passed into the keeping of Stanislas Potocki, one of the great pioneers of educational reform in Poland, not to be confounded with his ill-famed namesake, Felix Potocki. In it Kościuszko gives with brevity and characteristic modesty the account of the battle: how, with Poniatowski
- ↑ Printed in Edward Raczynski's Pictures of Poles and of Poland in the Eighteenth Century. Poznań, 1841 (Polish).
