With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz (big ebook reader .txt) 📕

feverishly of Zakhar. “What has happened? It cannot be. By the living God, it cannot be!”

Silence! Only the hissing of flames on the opposite side of the square, shaking out clusters of sparks, and from time to time a burnt house falls with a crash.

Now more couriers rush in. “Beaten are the Poles⁠—beaten!”

After them follow a detachment of Tartars. They march slowly, for they surround men on foot, evidently prisoners.

Skshetuski believes not his own eyes. He recognizes perfectly on the prisoners the uniform of the hetmans’ hussars; then he drops his hands, and with a wild, strange voice repeats persistently, “It cannot be! it cannot be!”

The roar of cannon was still to be heard. The battle was not finished, but through all the unburnt streets Zaporojians and Tartars were crowding in, their faces black, their breasts heaving, but they were coming as if intoxicated, singing songs. Thus return soldiers from victory.

The lieutenant grew pale as a corpse. “It cannot be!” repeated he in a hoarser voice⁠—“it cannot be! The Commonwealth⁠—”

A new object arrested his attention. Krechovski’s Cossacks enter the town, bringing bundles of flags. They come to the centre of the square, and throw them down. Polish flags!

The roar of the artillery weakens, and in the distance is heard the rumble of approaching wagons. One of them is in advance⁠—a lofty Cossack telega, and after it a line of others, all surrounded by Cossacks of the Pashkoff kuren, in yellow caps; they pass near the house where the Mirgorod men are standing.

Skshetuski put his hand over his eyes, for the glare of the burning blinded him, and looked at the prisoners sitting in the first wagon. Suddenly he sprang back, began to beat the air with his hands, like a man struck with an arrow in the breast, and from his lips came a terrible unearthly cry: “Jesus, Mary! the hetmans!”

He dropped into the arms of Zakhar; his eyes became leaden, his face grew stiff and rigid as that of a corpse.

A few minutes later three horsemen rode into the square of Korsún, at the head of countless regiments. The middle rider, in red uniform, sat on a white horse, holding a gilded baton at his side. He looked as proud as a king. This was Hmelnitski. On one side of him rode Tugai Bey, on the other Krechovski.

The Commonwealth lay prostrate in dust and blood at the feet of a Cossack.

XVI

Some days passed by. It appeared to men as if the vault of heaven had suddenly dropped on the Commonwealth. Jóltiya Vodi; Korsún; the destruction of the armies of the crown, ever victorious hitherto in struggles with the Cossacks; the capture of the hetmans; the awful conflagration in the whole Ukraine; slaughters, murders, unheard of since the beginning of the world⁠—all these came so suddenly that men almost refused to believe that so many misfortunes could come upon one land at a time. Many, in fact, did not believe it; some became helpless from terror, some lost their senses, some prophesied the coming of antichrist and the approach of the day of judgment. All social ties were severed; all intercourse between people and families was interrupted. Every authority ceased; distinction of persons vanished. Hell had freed from its chains all crimes, and let them out on the world to revel; therefore murder, pillage, perfidy, brutality, violence, robbery, frenzy, took the place of labor, uprightness, and conscience. It seemed as though henceforth people would live not through good, but through evil; that the hearts and intentions of men had become inverted, and that they held as sacred that which hitherto had been infamous, and that as infamous which hitherto had been sacred. The sun shone no longer upon the earth, for it was hidden by the smoke of conflagrations; in the night, instead of stars and moon, shone the light of fires. Towns, villages, churches, palaces, forests, went up in flames. People ceased to converse; they only groaned or howled like dogs. Life lost its value. Thousands perished without an echo, without remembrance. And from out all these calamities, deaths, groans, smoke, and burnings, there rose only one man. Every moment loftier and higher, every moment more terribly gigantic, he well-nigh obscured the light of day, and cast his shadow from sea to sea. That man was Bogdan Hmelnitski.

A hundred and twenty thousand men, armed and drunk with victory, stood ready at his nod. The mob had risen on all sides; the Cossacks of the towns joined him in every place. The country from the Pripet to the borders of the Wilderness was on fire. The insurrection extended in the provinces of Rus, Podolia, Volynia, Bratslav, Kiev, and Chernigoff. The power of the hetman increased each day. Never had the Commonwealth opposed to its most terrible enemy half the forces which he then commanded. The German emperor had not equal numbers in readiness. The storm surpassed every expectation. The hetman himself did not recognize at first his own power, and did not understand how he had risen so high. He shielded himself yet with justice, legality, and loyalty to the Commonwealth, for he did not know then that he might trample upon these expressions as empty phrases; but as his forces grew there rose in him that immeasurable, unconscious egotism the equal of which is not presented by history. The understanding of good and evil, of virtue and vice, of violence and justice, were confounded in the soul of Hmelnitski with the understanding of injuries done him, or with his personal profit. That man was honorable who was with him; that man was a criminal who was against him. He was ready to complain of the sun, and to count it as a personal injustice if sunshine were not given at his demand. Men, events, nay, the whole world, he measured with his own ego. But in spite of all the cunning, all the hypocrisy of the hetman, there was a kind