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The arquebusiers, who were posted on that spot, seeing the impetuosity of the Poles, and the quarter whence they came, supposed them to be a fresh squadron, gave ground, and opening in all directions, threw their own people into a confusion that completed the defeat. Kosciusko and the prince were equally successful, and a general panic amongst their adversaries was the consequence.
Kosciusko now looked on, sometimes with yet struggling hopes, then with well-founded convictions that "the doom was not yet spent;" and no more to be deluded one way or another, while such shifting grounds and sudden earthquakes were erupting the earth under his feet, like the prophet of old, boding worse things to come, he withdrew himself far into the solitudes of nature, into the wide yet noiseless temple of God, where the prayer of an honest man's heart might be heard and answered by that all-merciful and all-wise Being, who sometimes leaves proud men to themselves, to the lawless, headlong driving of their arrogant passions, to show them, in the due turn of events, what a vicious self-aggrandizing, abhorrent and despicable monster in human shape such a noble creature, when turned from the divine purpose of his creation, may become.
Kosciusko gave him the command of a division, with which he rendered useful services during the two sieges of Warsaw. Immediately after the surrender of that capital Poniatowski went to Vienna. He refused the offers of Catherine and Paul to bear arms in the service of Russia.
And now the eye of agony was strained in vain over the weltering waste, for a vestige of those refugees from the Kosciusko buried, perhaps, a thousand fathoms deep, by their sudden visitors, beneath the waves of that deadly Atlantic sea.
"Its direct aim being to draw a distinguishing line between the spirit of true patriotism and that of ambitious public discontent, between real glory, which arises from benefits bestowed, and the false fame of acquired conquests, which a leader of banditti has as much right to arrogate as would the successful invader of kingdoms, the character of General Kosciusko, under these views, presented itself to the writer as the completest exemplar for such a picture.
The remains of the soldiers of Kosciusko sought a refuge in republican France, and served with distinction, in the armies of Napoleon, against the powers that had dismembered their country. The ruin of Poland, as an independent state, was not fully accomplished until the year 1832, when it was incorporated into the great empire of Russia.
Kosciusko never swerved from his soul's loyalty to the bright Polish Laura of his cherished devotedness; and his subsequent correspondence, one of pure, unselfish friendship, with the youngest daughter of his venerable Anglo-American friend, lovely as she was pure, confided to her how faithful had been his heart's allegiance to the woman of his first and last vows.
Kosciusko asking what he meant, he answered, "As soon as a poor man on the road takes off his hat and asks for charity, the horse immediately stands still, and won't stir till something is given to the petitioner; and, as I had no money about me, I was obliged to make believe to give something, in order to satisfy the horse."
In one of these adventures, undertaken in conjunction with the celebrated Kosciusko, against an armed party of the enemy's wood-cutters, he fell into an ambuscade, was himself slain, while his second in command, Lieut. Moore, severely wounded, fell into the hands of the British. This was the last blood shed in the American revolution. It need not to have been shed.
And all things considered, neither French nor English admirers of the exiled hero could to-day very well carve on the adjoining rock, "And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell." Some time or other the Russian Imperial pair may visit Fontainebleau, whilst an English tourist with The Daily Mail in his pocket would naturally and sheepishly look the other way.
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