With Fire and Sword, Henryk Sienkiewicz [year 7 reading list txt] 📗

there went with him an army of one hundred thousand soldiers and nobles, besides legions of irregulars and attendants.

No one living of the personages in the foregoing narrative was absent. Prince Yeremi Vishnyevetski was there with his whole division, in which were serving, as of old, Skshetuski and Volodyovski, with the volunteer Zagloba; both hetmans, Pototski and Kalinovski, were there, ransomed at that time from Tartar captivity. There were present also Stephen Charnetski, later on the crusher of Karl Gustav, the Swedish king; Pan Pshiyemski, commander of all the artillery; General Ubald: Pan Artsishevski; Marek Sobieski, starosta of Krasnostav, with his brother, Yan Sobieski, starosta of Yavorov, afterward King Yan III; Ludvik Weyher, voevoda of Pomorie; Yakob, voevoda of Marienburg; Konyetspolski, the standard-bearer; Prince Dominik Zaslavski; the bishops, the dignitaries of the Crown, the senators⁠—the whole Commonwealth, with its supreme leader the king.

On the fields of Berestechko those many legions met at last, and there was fought one of the greatest battles of history⁠—a battle the echoes of which thundered through all contemporary Europe. It lasted for three days. During the first two the fates wavered; on the third a general engagement decided the victory.

Prince Yeremi began that engagement; and he was seen in front of the entire left wing as, armorless and bareheaded, he swept like a hurricane over the field against those gigantic legions, formed of all the mounted heroes of the Zaporojie, and all the Tartars⁠—Crimean, Nogai, and Bélgorod⁠—of Silistrian and Rumelian Turks, Urumbalis, Janissaries, Serbs, Wallachians, Periotes, and other wild warriors assembled from the Ural, the Caspian, and the swamps of Mæotis to the Danube. As a river vanishes from the eye in the foaming waves of the sea, so vanished from the eye the regiments of the prince in that sea of the enemy. A cloud of dust moved on the plain like a mad whirlwind and covered the combatants.

The whole army and the king stood gazing on this superhuman struggle. Leshchinski, the vice-chancellor, raised aloft the wood of the Holy Cross, and with it blessed the perishing.

Meanwhile, on the other flank, the army of the king was approached by the whole Cossack tabor, two hundred thousand strong, bristling with cannon, which vomited fire. It was like a dragon pushing slowly out of the woods his gigantic claws.

But before the bulk of the enemy had issued from the dust in which Vishnyevetski’s regiments had disappeared, horsemen began to drop away from their ranks, then tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of them, and rush to the height on which stood the Khan surrounded by his chosen guard. The wild legions fled in mad panic and disorder, pursued by the Poles. Thousands of Cossacks and Tartars strewed the battlefield; and among them lay, cut in two by a double-handed sword, the sworn enemy of the Poles but the trusty ally of the Cossacks, the wild and manful Tugai Bey.

The terrible prince had triumphed.

But the king looked with the eye of a leader on the triumph of the prince, and determined to break the hordes before the Cossacks could come up. All the forces moved, all the cannon thundered, scattering death and disorder. Soon the brother of the Khan, the lordly Amurat, fell struck in the breast with a bullet. The hordes roared with pain. Wounded in the very beginning of the battle, the Khan looked on the field with dismay. From the distance came Pshiyemski in the midst of cannon and fire, and the king with the horse; from both flanks the earth thundered beneath the weight of the cavalry rushing to the fight.

Then Islam Giréi quivered, left the field, and fled; and after him fled in disorder all the hordes⁠—the Wallachians, the Urumbali, the mounted warriors of the Zaporojie, the Silistrian Turks, and the renegades⁠—as a cloud before a whirlwind.

The despairing Hmelnitski caught up with the fugitives, wishing to prevail on the Khan to return to the battle; but the Khan, bellowing with rage at the sight of the hetman, ordered the Tartars to seize, bind him to a horse, and bear him away.

Now there remained but the Cossack tabor. The leader of that tabor, colonel of Krapivna, Daidyalo, knew not what had happened to Hmelnitski; but seeing the defeat and shameful flight of all the hordes, he stopped the advance, and pushing back with the tabor, halted in the marshy forks of the Pleshova.

Now a storm burst in the heavens, and measureless torrents of rain rushed down. “God was washing the land after a just battle.” The rain lasted some days, and some days the armies of the king rested, wearied from struggles; during this time the tabor surrounded itself with ramparts, and was changed into a gigantic movable fortress.

With the return of fair weather began a siege, the most wonderful ever seen in life. The hundred thousand warriors of the king besieged the twice one hundred thousand Zaporojians. The king needed cannon, provisions, ammunition. The Zaporojians had immeasurable supplies of powder and all necessaries, and besides seventy cannon of heavier and lighter calibre. But at the head of the king’s armies was the king, and the Cossacks had not Hmelnitski. The armies of the king were strengthened by a recent victory; the Cossacks were in doubt of themselves.

Several days passed; hope of the return of Hmelnitski and the Khan disappeared. Then negotiations began. The Cossack colonels came to the king, and beat the forehead to him, asking for pardon; they visited the senators’ tents, seizing them by their garments, promising to get Hmelnitski even from under the earth and deliver him to the king.

The heart of Yan Kazimir was not opposed to forgiveness. He wished to let the rabble return to their homes if all the officers were surrendered; these he determined to keep till Hmelnitski should be rendered up. But such an agreement was not to the mind of the officers, who, from the enormity of their offences, had no hope of forgiveness. Therefore in time