The soldiers of the Finnish Guard joined the other units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard in Białystok on April 11th, 1831. By this time, the Polish-Russian war had been raging for two months, and the insurrection was spreading, with violence and mayhem escalating on daily basis. On the same day as the Finnish soldiers listened Colonel Ramsay’s lecture on the Russian War Articles and the letters of protection issued to the Polish civilian population, one Russian cossack regiment massacred civilians in the small Lithuanian village of Oszmiana. The event was subsequently commemorated in Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poems.
The Polish-Russian war was fought on two fronts. In the south, on the eastern side of the Vistula, the main 100,000-man Russian army (under a Baltic German field-marshal, Hans Karl Friedrich Anton von Diebitsch) advanced directly towards Warsaw. Meanwhile, in the north, Grand-Duke Mikhail Pavlovich’s units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard (the Finnish Battalion included) approached the Polish capital from the northeast, through the dismal woodlands between the Narew and Bug rivers in Mazovia. You can get a rough view of the surroundings from the map. (Click on it for a larger image in a new window.)
Diebitsch’s army crossed the frontier on February 5th, fully prepared to crush the Polish rebellion. Resistance, however, proved to be a good deal tougher than anticipated; as mentioned before, the Congress Kingdom had a large, professional standing army, which now proved its mettle. On February 25th, the Poles halted the Russian advance in the bloody battle of Grochów. The Poles then began a counteroffensive. Lieutenant-General Ignacy Prądzyński, the Polish chief of staff, defeated the Russians at Dębe Wielkie on March 31st, and again at Iganie on April 10th.
But wars, like baseball games, aren’t over until they’re over.
Regretfully for the Polish war effort, their defeatist commander-in-chief, General Jan Skrzyniecki, failed to exploit these victories. Instead he attempted to negotiate with Diebitsch. The initiative passed once again to the Russians. Diebitsch and the main army held their position at Siedlce on the eastern side of the Vistula, handing off the main thrust of the Russian spring offensive to Grand-Duke Mikhail’s Life-Guard on the northern sector.
The Finnish soldiers received their first taste of combat. At the beginning of March, Grand-Duke Mikhail commenced a systematic operation to clear Polish insurgents out of the territory between the Narew and the Bug, in order to ensure their lines of communication through Węgrowo with Diebitsch’s main army in Siedlce. The Finnish Battalion was still incapacitated by the after-effects of the wintertime march across the Baltic provinces, but the situation on the front (and the honor of the Battalion) demanded action. Colonel Ramsay decided to form a separate commando of the able-bodied men of the unit. Captain Alexander Jakob Wendt took command of detachment of seventy sharp-shooters at Łomża on April 4th.
Nine days later, the Finnish sharp-shooters made their first contact with the enemy. The Finns provided support for the Russian troops of general major Neolov against Polish insurgents at Wyszków. As the Russians pursued the retreating Polish forces further southeast, the Finnish guardsmen participated in the advance on the town of Pułtusk. Wendt’s commandos survived the operation with minimal casualties. Only one younger NCO, Adolf Wämlin, was wounded in battle (although disease incapacitated three sharp-shooters during the march); Wämlin later died of his wounds.
Although the Finns had survived their first encounters with the enemy with minimal casualties, they were not spared from the impact of typhus, tuberculosis and other diseases. The newly-promoted, forty-year old Estonian sergeant Jung, whom we remember from the last episode, died from tuberculosis at the camp of Łomża on April 9th, eight months before he would have retired after twelve years of service. As you may remember, his wife Hedvig was pregnant at the time. The child was a daughter; she was born on June 29th, and received in baptism the name Hedvig Charlotta. On March 12th 1833, the untimely death of the baby girl deprived sergeant Jung’s widow of the last memory of her husband.
By the mid-April, the Finnish Guard was finally able to join combat with its full strength. On April 19th, the battalion received orders to defend the northern bank of the Bug against the insurgents. Since sharp-shooters were required at all posts, Finnish troops were dispersed along the riverbanks as separate companies were assigned to support the Russian forces at Kamieńczyk, Rybienko and Brok. The Finns were able to repulse the Polish attempts to cross the Bug without suffering any losses themselves.
For the Finnish soldiers, these short encounters marked a welcome break from the lethargy of the early spring, providing them with an opportunity to test their skills in battle. Simultaneously, however, the skirmishes apparently gave the soldiers a somewhat distorted image of their enemy. The Polish forces consisted mostly of the local levée-en-masse of Mazovia, and the entire purpose of the operation was merely to test the Russian defenses in preparation for a general offensive, which the Polish High Command planned to launch later on in the spring. Consequently, the Finnish soldiers were left with the impression that the enemy consisted of small, uncoordinated rebel bands that could be easily driven away on the field of battle. This complacence was to be proven unfounded in very short notice.
By now, the Finns were also faced with another particularly lethal and persistent enemy. The Russian troops that had served in the Caucasus in 1829 brought home one unpleasant souvenir — the global cholera epidemic, which had quickly overtaken southern Russia and crept towards the Polish borders. With the warm spring, the disease now gained momentum within the Russian army, and the late April witnessed a sudden, massive outbreak. While there had been only 319 fatalities in March, a month later cholera caused no less than 3,170 deaths. The soldiers of the Finnish Guard also began to fall ill at an alarming pace. On May 2nd, no less than twenty-two soldiers reported sick, with the only methods of fighting this previously-unknown disease being evacuation or quarantine. Both were used. They apparently worked to some extent, considering that ten days later, the Battalion’s loss rate was down to five men per day. The disease also claimed the life of the one person whose task otherwise would have been to lay the others in their graves: on May 8th, Karl Henrik Ingman, the Lutheran chaplain of the Battalion, died from cholera. He was buried near the village of Nowa Wieś on the following day.
On the second week of May, general Skrzyniecki’s Polish army commenced its northwards offensive in the Narew valley. The intention was to destroy Grand-Duke Mikhail’s forces before they could link up with Diebitsch and the Russian main army. Placed in the Russian rearguard, the Finnish soldiers experienced their hardest battle (so far) near the village of Przetycz south of Wąsewo on May 16th. Protecting the right flank of the Russian force, the Finnish sharp-shooters fought back a cavalry charge from General Dezydery Chłapowski’s dreaded Polish uhlans, occasionally having to rely on their bayonets when Polish cavalrymen managed to break into their ranks. The fighting intensified further during the retreat to Długosiodło, where attacking Polish lancers managed to encircle one Finnish commando unit under Ensign Henrik Lyra and 2nd-Ensign Fabian Reinhold Niklas Spalding, the two non-noble officers from our last episode. As the Polish horsemen leveled their lances on the Finnish soldiers, Lyra and Spalding decided it best to surrender, together with their thirteen sharp-shooters and one signaller.
For the Finnish soldiers, the battles on the road to Wąsewo on May 16th were the turning-point of the campaign. At one stroke, the Finnish sharp-shooters had lost 34 men in combat; four killed in action, 14 wounded, and 16 captured. Among the wounded was Colonel Ramsay himself, who caught a Polish bullet in his side while commanding the firing line from the front ranks. The significance of the encounter was that after fighting a series of minor actions against an often unseen adversary and suffering almost no casualties on the battlefield, the Finnish soldiers had finally met their Polish enemy face to face. Indeed, on that one day, the Finnish Guard had briefly served on the main scene of the war, holding back an advance guard of the largest Polish offensive during the war.
As a result, the enemy had suddenly become a real, dangerous opponent, capable of killing Finnish soldiers at a faster pace than frostbite, hunger ,or even cholera. The concrete manifestation of sudden, violent death on the battlefield clarified the consciousness that the Finnish soldiers had of the enemy and completed their experience as veterans, preparing them for the closing stage of the campaign. Even more significantly, the Emperor noticed the participation of the Finnish Battalion, and he personally commended the meritorious conduct of the Finnish sharp-shooters during their service in the rearguard.
The Poles had also noticed the presence of the Finnish sharp-shooters in the Russian army. Since the Poles were a minority nation in the Russian Empire, they obviously paid attention also to non-Russian units that were serving in the Tsarist army. The subsequent poems of Adam Mickiewicz and Ludwik Mierosławski focused on the multi-national assortment of the Russian forces, portraying the Tsarist military machine as an “alien, non-Slavonic force” with Baltic German officers, Crimean Tatar cavalrymen with “squinted eyes,” Samoyed soldiers, Tungus soldiers and so on. The conclusion was that Poland was defeated only because the Russian Emperor managed to rally the vast masses his subject nations. If this sounds familiar to American readers, it should; it’s exactly similar to some post-Civil War southern apologias of how the cavalier warriors of the Confederacy had been not so much defeated as simply overwhelmed by the sheer masses of the Union army, which included recent immigrants — “the trash of Europe” — and, of course, blacks. Needless to say, this concept has even deeper historical roots, all the way back to the Thermopylae and “all the armies of Asia.”
The Finnish soldiers are mentioned in surprisingly many Polish memoirs and at least in two popular novels. One particularly interesting, if perhaps not the most detailed, remark is in the memoirs of Elżbieta Pakoszowa, who commented how the Finnish soldiers were “easily recognizable by their white conplexion and their light blonde hair”; as far as I know, this was the only reference made by a woman. Prince Stanisław Jabłonowski, who served as a young lieutenant in Guard’s Horse Artillery Battery in the Royal Polish Army, subsequently gave a more concise description in his story of the battles of Przetycz and Długosiodło. Jabłonowski’s testimony portrayed a fierce encounter where Finnish sharp-shooters killed several Polish soldiers with their excellent marksmanship, beat back Chłapowski’s cavalry charges, held fast under Polish artillery fire, brilliantly used the forested terrain to their advantage and withdraw only step by step in the middle of the woods, successfully delaying the Polish attack. Jabłonowski’s memoirs presented the Finns as a tough martial race, yet another wild untamed warrior tribe in the service of the Tsar, although in this case, the general tone was admiration instead of contempt.
Even more interestingly, Jabłonowski also described a meeting with two captured Finnish officers — who are not mentioned by name, but who could plausibly be Lyra and Spalding, prisoners captured at Długosiodło. Jabłonowski tells us how he and his colleagues had, as true gentlemen who wanted to show their respect towards the brave enemy, invited the captured “Swedish” officers for breakfast. The officers accepted the hospitality, but rejected offers to defect to the Polish side, responding that “our homeland is distant and small, while Muscovy is large and right there breathing down our necks; whether it is pleasant or not, we shall carry out our orders with accuracy”. This Polish description of the stalwart response of the Finnish officers would certainly be a characteristic example of early 19th century Finnish loyalism towards the Russian Emperor. Jabłonowski, on his part, simply could not understand why these men, “uprooted from their motherland,” voluntarily fought for the “same régime which had made war on their own country, when they could have so easily joined forces with us.” The contrast between Poland and Finland could not have been demonstrated any more clearly.
As for what happened to Lyra, Spalding and the other Finnish prisoners-of-war afterwards; they were escorted by the Poles to Warsaw, where they remained in captivity until September. The Finnish prisoners were treated quite well, and in fact, they were privileged compared to their Russian comrades-in-arms. As it is, the Finnish soldiers were lucky enough to meet three Swedish doctors, Sven Jonas Stille, Zacharias Stenkula and Gustaf Bergh, who had volunteered to serve in a Polish military hospital after graduating from the Medical Faculty of the University of Lund. The Swedish doctors were quite glad to help the Finnish prisoners, whom they considered former countrymen, and employed them as assistants at their hospital. This extraordinary cooperation might be taken as an example of the bonds of sentiment that still existed between Finns and Swedes, in spite of two decades of separation following the Russian conquest of Finland. Still, on foreign ground and in the middle of a war, the solidarity between two neighbouring Scandinavian nations was probably even more pronounced than usual.
The story of the end of the campaign and its impact on Finnish public opinion, as well as a brief analysis of the long-term consequences of the campaign and its memory, deserves at least one more post. Everyone still keeping up with me?
Yes, sir!
Posted by: Noel Maurer | April 07, 2009 at 03:47 PM
Excellent stuff. I'm looking forward to more.
Posted by: JL | April 10, 2009 at 11:09 AM