upport of those
compatriots who are committing violence against the welfare and will of
our country. You behold, therefore, the indispensable necessity that we
should adopt as best we can every measure to defend and save our
country. Whatever, honourable Estates, you resolve I will not only
accede to, but I hereby declare that I will take my place in person
wheresoever my presence shall be called for." Probably those of his
audience who knew the King best took his words at their true value.

On May 22nd the Russian army crossed the frontier. Poland appealed to
the terms of her treaty with Prussia, and requested the Prussian state
to come to her assistance. Prussia threw off the mask and disavowed her
treaty obligations; and the Poles were left to their own resources.
Their numbers equalled, according to Kosciuszko's computation, one
single column of the Russian army. An empty treasury, an empty arsenal,
were behind them; they were pitted against seasoned soldiers, trained in
successful war; but the fire of patriotism ran high through their ranks.
Many of the nobles, following the old traditions of Polish history,
raised regiments in their own provinces, armed them at their own cost,
and in person led them to the field. The commander-in-chief was young
Jozef Poniatowski, the nephew of the King. He was to become one of the
most popular of Poland's heroes, as the brilliant leader of a Polish
army during the Napoleonic wars; but at this moment he was a youth of
twenty-eight, whose military knowledge was wholly negligible, and who
owed his high position to his family connections. The only Polish
general who had practical experience of war was Kosciuszko; and with
him, for all Poniatowski's devoted service of his country, rests the
chief fame of the Ukraine campaign.

The story of that three months' campaign is one of a gallant struggle of
a little army, now winning, now losing, inflicting heavy loss upon a
superior enemy, but gradually driven back by overwhelming numbers
through Volhynia and Podoha. During all these weeks of desperate
fighting Kosciuszko 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 Kosciuszko as "doing great service, not only by his
courage, but also by his singular prudence." At Wlodzimierz, when the
Polish army was in the utmost danger of an