ga.

With justifiable pride the Poles point to the part played by their
national hero in the victory at Saratoga which won for America not only
the campaign, but her recognition as an independent nation from Louis
XVI. The Americans on their side freely acknowledged that Kosciuszko's
work turned the scale in their favour. Gates modestly diverted the flood
of congratulations of which he was the recipient by the observation that
"the hills and woods were the great strategists which a young Polish
engineer knew how to select with skill for my camp"; and his official
report to Congress states that "Colonel Kosciuszko chose and entrenched
the position," Addressing the President of Congress at the end of the
year 1777, Washington, speaking of the crying necessity of engineers for
the army, adds: "I would take the liberty to mention that I have been
well informed that the engineer in the northern army (Kosciuszko I think
his name is) is a gentleman of science and merit."[1] The plan of the
fortifications that saved Saratoga is preserved in Kosciuszko's own hand
among Gates's papers, and traces of them could as late as 1906 be still
discerned among beds of vegetables.

That winter of the war--1777-1778--was famous for its length and its
intolerable severity. The American soldiers suffered from all the
miseries of hunger and cold and insufficient pay, Kosciuszko, to whom
the piercing rigour of the climate must have seemed as a familiar
visitant from his northern Lithuanian home, was on the borders of Canada
when he heard of the arrival in Trenton of a Pole, famous, as Kosciuszko
himself as yet was not, in the national records of Poland--Kazimierz
Pulaski. With his father, brothers, and cousin, Pulaski had led the war
of the Bar Confederation. He alone survived his family. His father died
in prison, suspected by his confederates; his brothers fell in battle,
or in their turn breathed their last in prison. Ignorant of fear and
gaily risking all for his country, Kazimierz carried on the struggle
without them. Pursued on all sides by the Russians, he performed almost
incredible feats of doubling and unheard-of marches: leading his troops
in the Ukrainian steppes, escaping to the Carpathians, reappearing in
Great Poland, fighting on until the last doomed defence of Czenstochowa,
after which he was seen no more in Poland. In, Paris he met Benjamin
Franklin and other envoys of the States, and, like Kosciuszko, he set
sail to fight for