The Battle of Stoczek, 1831: Dwernicki's uhlans

In February 1831 a Russian army of about 115,000 men marched into the Kingdom of Poland to put down the November Uprising. The first good news for the insurgents came from the wooded country around a small town east of Warsaw, where General Józef Dwernicki set his cavalry and guns on a Russian division that thought itself safe.²

Who won the Battle of Stoczek and why?

The Poles won. Dwernicki's corps routed General Geismar's horsemen and took eleven of their guns by Polish counts. They won because Geismar sent his men forward in two columns along narrow forest roads, the Polish guns caught each column as it came out to deploy, and Dwernicki's lancers and mounted rifles then broke the columns one after the other.³

Background

The November Uprising broke out in Warsaw on the night of 29 November 1830, when young officers and students rose against Russian rule. Talks with Tsar Nicholas I led nowhere, and on 25 January 1831 the Polish Sejm dethroned him as King of Poland.⁴

The Russian army crossed the border on 5 and 6 February under Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch and made for Warsaw along the road from Brest. On its southern flank rode the 5th Reserve Cavalry Corps of General Cyprian Kreutz, whose core was the 2nd Mounted Rifles Division of General Fyodor Geismar. In the hard winter Geismar's regiments were quartered in the villages around Seroczyn.⁵

Dwernicki's decisions

Dwernicki had to build his corps almost from nothing. In early February he turned down command of a raid across the Bug, Trąbski writes, because he thought a battalion, four light guns and two squadrons of krakus volunteers far too weak to achieve anything. In his memoirs he describes how, given instead a corps of volunteers and fresh conscripts, he asked the government for a regiment of regular cavalry and one of infantry and was refused.⁶

The artillery was the weakest arm. Dwernicki records that the arsenal could find only four guns of the right caliber and that two more had to be borrowed from the Warsaw city guard; just before leaving the capital he met Józef Puzyna, a former horse artillery officer, and gave him the battery. Puzyna himself writes that it went into battle only fourteen days after it was formed, its crews drilled twice a day in front of the arsenal and then at every halt on the march, with some twenty volunteers from the National Guard among them.⁷

The first order sent the corps against Geismar. On 10 February, according to Dwernicki, he was told to cross the Vistula at once and bar the Russian road from Kock; when local people warned that the ice would not hold, he went out on it himself with men carrying axes and iron bars, cutting holes to test its thickness, and the cavalry crossed on foot in single file that night. Puzyna brought the guns over at Mniszew the next afternoon by lifting them off their carriages and dragging them across on empty sledges. By 12 February the corps had gathered at Żelechów.⁸

Dwernicki meant to slip along side roads to the Russian camps around Łuków and fall on them by surprise. On 13 February one of his patrols ran into Cossacks and lost men taken prisoner, which, he wrote, must have betrayed his march. That night two priests from Łuków brought word that Geismar was moving to cross the Vistula and join General Kreutz. Strzeżek's study of the Russian orders shows that on 14 February Diebitsch was indeed weighing whether to send both of Kreutz's divisions across the river.⁹

When his vanguard took a Russian outpost on the morning of the battle, Dwernicki learned from the prisoners that the enemy outnumbered him and had far stronger artillery. In his memoirs he explains why he fought anyway: to turn back in front of the enemy would only invite pursuit, a retreat could be carried out calmly by seasoned troops alone, and a defeat in the first encounter of the war would have strengthened those who claimed that Poland could not stand up to Russian power.¹⁰

Armies and commanders

Geismar was a professional cavalryman who had begun his career in the Austrian army before going over to Russian service, and he had fought the Turks in 1828 and 1829. In 1831 he led the 2nd Mounted Rifles Division.¹¹

Against him came Józef Dwernicki, born in 1779, who had first served as a volunteer in the artillery of the old Commonwealth as a youth. In 1809 he raised a troop of horse on his estates in Podolia and joined the Polish forces fighting the Austrians, and he went on to serve in the 15th Uhlans in Napoleon's campaigns, winning distinction at Leipzig. In the Kingdom of Poland he commanded the 2nd Uhlans from 1815, wrote cavalry drill regulations and became a brigadier general in 1829.¹² › Battle of Leipzig, 1813

Historians paint him in different colors. Maciej Trąbski, the historian of the Polish cavalry of the period, calls him an excellent trainer and organizer, known for his extravagance and cavalryman's dash; Bartos and Dunn describe a portly lover of good food and drink who stood on excellent terms with his troopers.¹³

His force was a mix of the best and the newest. Its core was regular cavalry, uhlans and mounted rifles, with krakus volunteer horse, infantry and a newly formed battery of six guns under Captain Józef Puzyna, whose memoir is one of the best eyewitness accounts of the day.¹⁴

The battle in phases

Dwernicki marched to catch the Russians in their winter quarters. On the morning of 14 February his column moved off in the dark toward Stoczek, and the surprise was lost before the battle began. Puzyna writes that the Polish vanguard took most of a Russian outpost of dragoons and Cossacks, but an officer escaped and warned Geismar's vanguard; Bartos and Dunn have Cossack scouts taking one of Dwernicki's men prisoner. Either way, Geismar knew the Poles were coming.¹⁵

The ground between Seroczyn and Stoczek was marshy and cut by belts of forest, with only narrow roads through it. Geismar sent his men forward in two columns along two of those roads, each with guns, to strike the Poles from two sides. Dwernicki drew up on the heights near Stoczek with his guns in front. Local people from Seroczyn and Toczyska kept him informed of the Russian approach.¹⁶

The first Russian column had to come out of the forest and deploy under fire. The Polish guns went forward and opened on it at close range, and the uhlans of Major Franciszek Russyan charged with the lance, broke the column and took the guns that had come with it; the rest fled.¹⁷

Dwernicki's own account adds the detail. Four of his squadrons met six of dragoons head on, and as a second dragoon regiment came up with its guns, Captain Lewiński's squadron of the 2nd Uhlans struck it in the flank; the Russians fell back in disorder over a narrow dyke and left their guns behind, five in Dwernicki's count, four in Puzyna's. Puzyna, who brought his battery out of a ravine at a trot to half range of the Russian line, writes that he set three guns against each Russian wing and, once the guns on the Russian right fell silent, massed all six at about 120 fathoms against the left.¹⁸

Turning point

Then Geismar's own column came into action on the other road, and the Polish guns turned on it. Dwernicki now staked everything on his cavalry. He led his mounted rifles and uhlans forward in person while his reserves struck the Russian flank, and Geismar's men, hit from several sides at once, broke.¹⁹

The second column stood its ground in a way that impressed its enemies. Dwernicki writes that his squadrons pulled up a few paces short of it; he rode over in person and sent the 1st Mounted Rifles round its left flank while the 2nd came on in front, so that the column was attacked from three sides before it broke and fled, leaving its guns. Puzyna names the units Dwernicki led in this charge as the 1st and 3rd Mounted Rifles and the 4th Uhlans, and counts seven guns taken.²⁰

The count of captured guns differs. Puzyna, who saw four taken in the first charge and seven in the second, makes it eleven, and Trąbski also counts eleven. Bartos and Dunn report that Dwernicki himself listed ten, while Russian sources admit to eight.²¹

Counting the losses

No full count of the dead survives from both sides. Dwernicki gives his own losses as 27 killed and 60 wounded, most of them by artillery fire; Puzyna, writing of his battery alone, lost two gunners, three drivers, seven horses and a wagon.²²

For the Russians the figures run far apart. Dwernicki claims about 400 prisoners, eight of them officers, 180 killed, among them two colonels, and 246 horses. Joseph Hordyński, an officer of the Lithuanian lancers whose history of the war appeared in Boston in 1832, writes of more than 1,000 prisoners with twenty officers. By his own account, Dwernicki left a hundred badly wounded prisoners in Stoczek in the care of the town's mayor.²³

Aftermath

The Poles did not chase the beaten Russians far down the narrow roads; they held the field until dusk and then marched off. Stoczek did not stop the Russian advance on Warsaw, which met the Polish army at Olszynka Grochowska on 25 February in a great battle that ended undecided.²⁴

Dwernicki gives his own reasons for not pursuing: the frozen, stony fields had cost many of his untrained horses their shoes. He was also needed elsewhere. An order told him to cross back over the Vistula and stop the Russian troops of Prince Adam of Württemberg, who had crossed the river at Puławy and were moving toward Warsaw. On 17 February the corps crossed the ice at Góra Kalwaria, in great disorder by Puzyna's account, with the cavalry squadrons quarreling over who should go first.²⁵

Tomasz Strzeżek argues that the victory still mattered. It covered the right flank of the main Polish army along the Brest road, and, without Dwernicki knowing it, it upset a Russian plan: on the very day of the battle Diebitsch was weighing whether to send both of Kreutz's divisions across the Vistula, into the province of Sandomierz. After the defeat Geismar joined the main army instead.²⁶

Bartos and Dunn see its weight above all in morale. As the first battle of the war, won before the Russian juggernaut reached Warsaw, it lifted spirits in the capital. Dwernicki was promoted general of division, and a week later, on 19 February, he fought Kreutz at Nowa Wieś near Kozienice: a victory in Trąbski's account, an undecided fight in Strzeżek's.²⁷

The captured guns gave him a nickname. Trąbski records that after Stoczek Dwernicki sent five of the eleven captured guns to Warsaw and won a name in Europe as the "gun provider", and Bartos and Dunn found an American newspaper of the day calling him the cannon provider, always bringing in fresh pieces taken from the enemy.²⁸

He went on to win at Kurów on 3 March and to free Lublin for a few days, and then led his corps east into Volhynia to raise the country. Trapped against the Austrian frontier by stronger Russian forces after the fighting at Boremel in April, he crossed into Austrian Galicia on 27 April 1831 and was interned.²⁹

Legacy and memory

After the uprising Dwernicki went into exile in France and threw himself into émigré politics. Jean Gigoux painted his portrait, shown at the Paris Salon of 1833. He returned to Austrian Poland in 1848 and died in 1857.³⁰

The battle passed into song. Wincenty Pol's Krakusy, written in honor of the volunteer cavalry, opens with the line "Grzmią pod Stoczkiem armaty" (The guns thunder at Stoczek), and it was still being sung far from Poland: the tenor Michael Zazulak recorded it for Columbia in New York in 1916 or 1917.³¹ › For Your Freedom and Ours

The historian Jarosław Czubaty notes that Stoczek, like Ostrołęka, is well known to the people who live there, with monuments, schools named after the heroes of the uprising and historical reenactments. A monument stands on the battlefield, and the secondary school in Stoczek Łukowski bears Dwernicki's name.³² › Battle of Ostrołęka, 1831