The Battle of Raszyn was fought on 19 April 1809, at the start of the Polish-Austrian War. An Austrian corps of about 30,000 under Archduke Ferdinand marched on Warsaw, and Prince Józef Poniatowski met it at Raszyn with roughly half as many Polish and Saxon troops, behind marshes and ponds that could be crossed only on a few causeways. The fiercest fighting was for the village of Falenty, where Poniatowski himself led a counterattack. Colonel Cyprian Godebski, a soldier and poet, was mortally wounded in the night fighting for Raszyn. The Poles held their main line until dark, then withdrew, and on 21 April Warsaw was handed over by convention. Poniatowski then carried the war into Austrian Galicia and won it.2
In April 1809, while Napoleon's main army was far away on the Danube, Austria struck at the young Duchy of Warsaw, expecting a quick march to its capital. A dozen or so kilometers southwest of Warsaw, among ponds, alder thickets and wet meadows, Prince Józef Poniatowski chose to fight with an army half the size of the enemy's. The battle lasted from noon until late at night, and the army that lost the capital two days later went on to win the war.3
Austria strikes at the Duchy
After Austerlitz in 1805, the Habsburg court lost Venice, Istria, Dalmatia and its lands in the old Holy Roman Empire, and Vienna was eager for revenge. Napoleon's victory over Prussia and Russia then created the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 out of lands Prussia had taken in the Second and Third Partitions, together with part of its gains from the First. Austria now had on its northern border an ally of France that dreamed of winning back Galicia, including Kraków.4
When Austria went to war with France again in April 1809, it sent its VII Corps, about 30,000 men, against the Duchy. In command was Archduke Ferdinand Karl Joseph of Austria-Este, not yet 30, one of the few Austrian generals who had come out of the 1805 campaign with his reputation intact. His orders called for operations that were quick, sudden and decisive. On 14 April, in his camp at Odrzywół near Nowe Miasto on the Pilica, he issued a proclamation urging the people of the Duchy not to resist, and he made no secret that the aim was to restore the borders of 1806, which meant the end of the Duchy itself.5
The border ran only a dozen or so kilometers from Warsaw, and more than ten thousand of the Duchy's soldiers were serving with Napoleon elsewhere, above all in Spain. Poniatowski had about 19,000 men in all, including 8,000 untrained recruits called up that spring. Russia was formally France's ally and was bound to act against Austria, but in practice it had no intention of fighting for the Duchy.6 › The Battle of Austerlitz, 1805
Two commanders
Józef Poniatowski, born in Vienna in 1763, was the nephew of Poland's last king. He had served first in the Austrian army, fought the Russians in 1792 and joined Kościuszko's rising in 1794, and in 1807 Napoleon made him commander in chief of the Duchy's army. He had built that army almost from nothing, and he had many political enemies in Warsaw who would have used a surrender of the capital without a fight to strip him of his command and his post as minister of war. When news of the war reached him on 15 April he sank for several hours into deep gloom, aware that the Duchy's fate might already be sealed. Then he shook it off, began preparing for a pitched battle in front of the city, and that same evening rode out to the camp at Raszyn.7 › The Battle of Zieleńce, 1792
Ferdinand's main force, more than 25,000 strong, advanced on Warsaw from the southwest, slowed by roads that a sudden thaw had turned into mud. Poniatowski, with fewer than 14,000 men on the field, sent General Aleksander Rożniecki's cavalry brigade forward to delay the enemy and gather news of it. The archduke counted on scattering the Poles and entering Warsaw quickly. He did not expect a pitched battle on the last line before the capital.8
A line of ponds and causeways
Poniatowski expected the Austrians to come this way rather than storm the earthworks at Praga across the Vistula. He chose Raszyn, where the Wrocław and Kraków roads met behind a marshy stream and a chain of ponds that could be crossed only on a few causeways. General Michał Sokolnicki's advance guard, the first battalions of the 1st and 8th Infantry Regiments, held Falenty Duże and Falenty Małe, two hamlets separated by an alder wood on the Raszyn causeway. A battalion of the 6th Regiment stood at Janki, covering the road from Nadarzyn. On the right, the 3rd Regiment and a few guns under General Łukasz Biegański guarded the crossings near Michałowice; on the left, General Ludwik Kamieniecki held Jaworowa and Dawidy with two battalions and six guns. Raszyn itself was held by the 2nd Regiment, three Saxon battalions, a squadron of hussars and twelve guns under the Saxon general Polenz. About 1,200 Saxon soldiers fought alongside the Poles.9
The ground was the Poles' best ally. Bogs, wet meadows and narrow dikes left little room for the Austrian cavalry, which was strong in numbers but could do little to support its infantry here.10
Guns and cavalry before noon
Before the main battle, the cavalry of both sides clashed near Nadarzyn, where the Polish 2nd Uhlans fought the archduke's hussars. After several hours Rożniecki's horsemen fell back behind Poniatowski's line to form the last reserve. Around noon, as the morning mist thinned, the Poles saw the Austrian columns coming. A first charge by Austrian horse was beaten off, and some cuirassiers bogged down in the marshy ground and were cut down by Polish fire.11
At about 2 p.m. the archduke attacked along two axes, toward Jaworowa and Dawidy and along the causeway through Falenty toward Raszyn. On the left, Wallachian battalions took Dawidy but could go no further under artillery fire and attacks by the Polish cavalry. In front of Falenty an artillery duel lasted about an hour, a very long time for the period, between Roman Sołtyk's horse battery and Austrian batteries several times stronger. Sołtyk's guns belonged to a squadron of horse artillery only a few months old, raised by two rich young aristocrats, Sołtyk himself and Włodzimierz Potocki.12
The fight for Falenty
Then the Hungarian 48th Infantry Regiment, Vukassovich's, went in against Falenty. The alder wood where Colonel Cyprian Godebski's battalion of the 8th Regiment stood became the scene of an hour of savage fighting with bayonets and musket butts. In the end the Austrians drove the Poles out, and the defenders, bled white, fell back in disorder from Falenty Małe as well. The village changed hands several times that afternoon, and Godebski, a veteran of the Polish Legions in Italy and a known poet, received his first wound there.13
At the critical moment Poniatowski left his staff and galloped to Falenty. He rallied what was left of the 8th Regiment's battalion, put himself at the head of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment, and led it across the causeway against the Hungarians, musket in hand and a pipe in his mouth. The sight of the commander in chief in the front rank lifted his shaken men, and the counterattack won back every lost position. Badly shaken in turn, the Austrians could not retake Falenty and the wood.14
Night battle in Raszyn
Only around 6 p.m. did fresh Austrian battalions join the exhausted Hungarians, and this time the defenders could not hold. The Poles fell back from Falenty and Janki toward Raszyn, whose houses the 2nd Regiment and the Saxons had turned into small fortresses. Companies of General Karl von Schauroth's column now came up from Nadarzyn, and nine Austrian battalions pressed on the village. At about 7 p.m. the Austrians forced the causeway into Raszyn. The Poles fought on from a fortified mill on the Mrowa stream, and in complete darkness the battle went on in the narrow, boggy lanes of the village.15
At about 8.30 p.m. the Austrian infantry broke out in front of the village and ran into a battery of 16 Polish and Saxon guns, which opened a murderous fire. A Polish counterattack drove the Austrians out of Raszyn, around 10 p.m. by Piecyk's account, and the battle died away. In this fighting Godebski, clearing one of the buildings, was hit for the third time. The wound was fatal. With no surgeon at hand he bled to death in an ambulance cart on the road to Warsaw.16
Why Warsaw was given up
By midnight both armies were badly bled. The Saxons, following orders given before the battle, left the field, and Poniatowski ordered a withdrawal, knowing that a second day would end in disaster. At a council of war held in Warsaw in the small hours, Poniatowski, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, Jean Pelletier, Rożniecki, the city's commandant and the French resident all agreed that waiting for the enemy in the city would mean total defeat.17
The way out came from the archduke himself, who proposed talks. They began on 20 April in an inn outside the Jerusalem tollgate, where the Austrians tried to win Poniatowski over and a 24-hour truce was agreed. On 21 April a convention was signed: the Polish army would leave Warsaw within 48 hours, taking its arms and equipment with it. A separate agreement covered Praga on the right bank, which the Austrians promised not to attack as long as the Polish detachment there stayed neutral. Poniatowski accepted it against the wishes of the people of Warsaw, who were still strengthening the earthworks around their city.18
From Raszyn to Galicia
Instead of waiting to be trapped, Poniatowski concentrated his army on 21 to 23 April in the fork of the Vistula and the Bug and Narew, then struck south. The bridgehead at Góra Kalwaria was taken on 2 and 3 May, Sokolnicki beat the Austrians beyond the Vistula, and the way into Austrian Galicia lay open. Zamość, the gateway to eastern Galicia with its arsenal, was stormed in the night of 19 to 20 May; resistance ended at about 4 a.m. on 20 May, and Poniatowski arrived in the town on 22 May. By the end of May Polish troops held Sandomierz, Zamość and Lwów, and in July they entered Kraków. Ferdinand had to abandon Warsaw, which he did on 1 June, and march south to fight in Galicia.19
The Russian ally proved anything but. Its troops crossed into Galicia on 3 June with secret orders to occupy the province and avoid fighting the Austrians, and Poniatowski had to maneuver around a corps that was supposed to help him and in fact tried to block his way. After Napoleon's victory at Wagram on 5 and 6 July, the Treaty of Schönbrunn of 14 October gave the Duchy the lands Austria had taken in the Third Partition and the Zamość district, more than 50,000 square kilometers in all, while Russia took the Tarnopol district.20
Victory, draw or defeat?
On the field, nobody won. The Poles held their main line until dark and then left, and two days later the capital was in Austrian hands, so some accounts call Raszyn an Austrian victory. Polish historians usually describe it as an indecisive battle, and its importance lay elsewhere. It showed that the small Duchy could defend itself with its own forces, which mattered enormously to a society that hoped for a restored Poland. And the army that survived Raszyn intact became the instrument of the Galician campaign of 1809, one of the greatest successes in Polish military history, which made Poniatowski a national hero.21
Casualty figures differ sharply between accounts, and the sources cited here give no reliable count, so any single number should be treated with caution. What is certain is that the fighting at Falenty and in Raszyn was long and bloody for both sides.22
Raszyn in paint and memory
Within a few years painters took up the battle. Aleksander Orłowski drew it around 1817, possibly after talking with Colonel Aleksander Oborski, a veteran of Raszyn. Michał Stachowicz painted it in 1821, though his canvas was lost after 1850. January Suchodolski, a veteran of the November Uprising, painted the battle in 1832 and returned to it in 1855 with The Death of Godebski, which fixed the poet's death beside a wayside shrine in the national imagination, though nothing of the kind happened. Later came Juliusz Kossak and his son Wojciech, who painted a whole cycle in 1913 for the centenary of Poniatowski's death, and Stefan Żeromski, whose novel Ashes carried the battle to a new generation of readers.23
Poniatowski himself did not live long after his greatest campaign. Made a marshal of France during the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, he was wounded on the last day of the battle and drowned trying to cross the Elster on horseback.24 › The Battle of Leipzig, 1813
For more Polish battles of the age, see the guide to the greatest battles in Polish history, the charge at Somosierra a few months earlier, the Napoleonic era, and what else happened on 19 April.
