Poland полностью

‘Do not disturb yourself, most beloved wife, for God watches over us,’ Hetman man żółkiewski wrote from his camp at Cecora in Moldavia on the night of 6 October 1620. ‘And if I should perish it will be because I am old and of no further use to the Commonwealth, and the Almighty will grant that our son may take up his father’s sword, temper it on the necks of pagans and, if it should come to pass as I said, avenge the blood of his father.’ The next day his army was defeated and his body hacked to pieces by Turkish janissaries. His head was sent to Istanbul, where it was displayed on a pike. What sustained such attitudes was the conviction that Poland had a special part to play in God’s scheme. This notion deeply marked the seventeenth-century szlachta, for warfare was their preserve.

The father of Polish military science was Hetman Jan Tarnowski, who published his Consilium Rationis Bellicae in 1558. He elaborated the old Hussite tactic of forming a square, a mobile fortress which could save a small army caught out in the open, and this became standard practice in all operations against Tatars and Turks. The need to move fast and to live off the land meant that Polish armies operated in divisions, while most European armies marched in a great mass until the end of the eighteenth century. Another peculiar feature was the tradition of the deep cavalry raid sweeping out ahead of the main army in a great arc behind enemy lines. The Poles were also in advance of their enemies in terms of artillery. From the Turks they had learnt much about incendiary and explosive shells, and they developed rocketry to great effect.

The core of the Commonwealth’s armed forces was a small body of infantry consisting of peasant levies, raised on and paid for by 25 per cent of revenue from the starosties and royal lands, and therefore known as ‘quarter troops’. In 1579 King Stephen instituted a new system under which peasants from royal lands could volunteer to become reserve soldiers, freed from all servage and dues in return for their regular training and readiness to fight, and paid when on active service. This type of infantry, known as Piechota Wybraniecka, was effective on account of its regular training in peacetime and its good morale. Lightly dressed, without helmets or armour, the men were equipped with a musket, short sword and hatchet. Only one man in eight carried a pike. In the 1550s, a Polish regiment of two hundred men could deliver 150 shots in five minutes, while contemporary Spanish brigades of 10,000 men operating in the Netherlands could only deliver 750 in the same time—ten times less on a man-to-man basis. The Commonwealth also employed mercenaries—German, Scottish or French infantry drilled on standard European lines. It could also count in the hour of need on the private armies of magnates.

The infantry was outnumbered by cavalry, and, aside from a few regiments of regular dragoons, this was based on the chivalric pattern of the knight and his squires. The szlachta who fought in the front line were known as towarzysze, or ‘companions’. Each companion would bring with him as many men as he could afford to equip, most of them poor szlachta, to make up the second and third ranks, and these were known as pocztowi, literally ‘retainers’. Companions equipped themselves and their retainers at their own expense, but received soldier’s pay when on active service.

The presence in the ranks of large numbers of volunteers, and particularly of szlachta fighting not for the cause of some king but for their own Commonwealth, gave them the same edge over their enemies as that enjoyed by the soldiers of revolutionary France in the 1790s. The gentleman-trooper carried the szlachta’s democratic principles in his saddlebag and thought of his commander and the Hetman as elder brothers.

The pride and glory of the Polish cavalry, its mailed fist, was the Husaria. The companions of the front rank carried a lance of up to twenty feet in length, which outreached infantry pikes, allowing the Husaria to cut straight through a square, and a sabre or a rapier with a six-foot blade which doubled as a short lance. Each companion also carried a pair of pistols, a short carbine, a bow and arrows and a variety of other weapons. The retainers carried much the same arsenal without the lance, while the rear rank often led spare mounts into the charge.