Pulaski and the Revolution

...He is reputed to have surpassed the Russian Cossacks in horsemanship, and in 1768, at the early age of twenty, he first utilized his military training and skill as a cavalry officer in the movement led by his father to free his beloved Poland from the tyranny of Russia...

...Savannah did not wait until this day and time to honor him and them, and it is with joyful appreciation that it learns of the plan of Americans of Polish extraction as well as citizens of Poland itself to erect on Georgia soil a greater monument to keep green the memory of his achievements and ideals...

...Washington was impressed, and in a communication to Congress on August 28 of that year he recommended that Pulaski be utilized in the cavalry, then a disjointed organization of four independent regiments...

...When Standish O'Grady, the distinguished Irish scholar, was visiting this country, he reminded us that twice in the world's history when men did things that the race will never willingly forget--in the fifth century before Christ in Greece, and in the thirteenth century of our era--they spent more than one-third of their time at leisure, that is in the celebration of religous mysteries of various kinds...

...Congress delegated to the city the Pulaski sesquicentennial committee...

...At the request of the mayor's committee, the bishop of Savannah had arranged that a Solemn Pontifical Mass should open the day's program...

...a program of addresses...

...They could be as solitary as they chose, their privacy would be scrupulously respected, but for those who wished or perhaps lacked it in their ordinary lives, there would be evenings of stimulating conversation...

...The result was the forming, with the approval of Congress at the request of the Commander-in-Chief, of the Pulaski Legion of sixty-eight cavalry and two hundred infantrymen...

...After six months he resigned his command...

...Pulaski commanded the French and American cavalry...

...But the ground of antipathy to Russia common to him and the Turks, seems not to have been sufficient to overshadow their differences, and he is next heard of in Paris, stirred by the reports of the brave fight the American colonies were making for their liberties...

...Pulaski lies prostrate on the ground...

...I leaped toward him, thinking possibly his wound was not dangerous, but a cannister shot had pierced his thigh and the blood was flowing from his breast--probably from the second wound...

...General Lincoln approved...

...This monument was never completed, but twenty-eight years later, on Pulaski Day in 1853, the original corner-stone and records were removed to Monterey Square and a new monument begun...

...General Lincoln was commander of the American forces in the battle...

...He resolved to essay a sally of his cavalry through the opening to the city beyond in order to disconcert the enemy and encourage the town...

...His friend is quite sure that "the average man could be neither persuaded nor bribed to visit one of them...

...his son found himself in command...

...It is not inappropriate that along the coast of Georgia, reddened by the blood of Franciscan and Jesuit martyrs to the cause of religion generations before Plymouth, the remains of Pulaski and his hundreds of Catholic companion martyrs to the cause of liberty should rest...

...it is estimated that the French, under Count D'Estaing, constituted two-thirds of the troops...

...The American and allied troops were mowed down by cannon...

...To a friend who asked, "And who would do the stimulating...

...But he perhaps saved the army at Warren Tavern and he also distinguished himself at Germantown...

...October 9, the date of the battle itself, has been Savannah's Pulaski Day...

...and the conveying of official visitors down the harbor on the coast guard patrol Pulaski, to scatter flowers on the waters where the patrol's namesake was buried a century and a half ago...

...It has often been said that you can learn more about a man by finding out how he spends his leisure than in any other way...

...His friend doubts whether such places would serve the average man, "the man one sees at ball games and lodge meetings and hotel lobbies and suburban trains...

...Give them room to expand, to breathe freely and naturally, and they throw off lethargy as though it were an old coat...

...I looked around...

...After the death of General Pulaski, Congress voted to erect a monument to him, but it was not until I9~o that the money was appropriated and the monument dedicated in Washington...

...O, sad moment, ever to he remembered...

...The great Atlantic, which he had crossed for freedom's sake, was his last resting-place...

...He was not proficient in the language of his troops...

...CLIFF HAVEN By JAMES TER the most successful session of its history, the Catholic Summer School of America in its annual meetings on Lake Champlain promises now more than ever before to exemplify why the Greeks used to express leisure, the term that is the root of our word for school...

...The date of October 9 was retained by the city this year for its local celebration, thereby affording the distinguished visitors who attended it an opportunity to be present at the exercises at the national Capitol on October II...

...An official delegation from the republic of Poland had come from SUMMERING AT Warsaw, and there were also representatives from the embassies of Poland, France and Czecho-Slovakia, chief executives of many of the states, officials of national Polish organizations and other notables, and Americans of Polish extraction from numerous cities of the East and Middle-West...

...Washington's admiration and confidence were undiminished...

...October 3 o, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 665 PULASKI AND THE REVOLUTION By RICHARD REID HE observance, under the President's proclamation, of October 1I as the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Casimir Pulaski's death, recalls the colorful career of this Polish hero of our Revolutionary War...

...it was completed two years later...

...Brigadier-General Pulaski was but thirty-one years old when he died, yet few men have crowded into a half-century more than did he in that brief span...

...The battle was fought to the west of the city, in the neighborhood of the present Central of Georgia railroad station...

...There is evidence that his orders were at times ignored...

...He said in a faint voice: "Jesus, Maria, Joseph...

...The American prospects were doubtful from the start...

...they were, it is reported, made hopeless by the desertion of an American officer who conveyed the plan of battle to the British...

...James Norman Hall, who has had most varied experiences as a war correspondent and traveler, culminating with ten years on the island of Tahiti, suggested in an article in the Atlantic Monthly (September, t929) that it was a great pity that the distracted J. WALSH and harassed average man, the man whom one meets on the streets of our busy cities or sits beside on the suburban trains, "might not have some places of silence where he could go into retreat as the Catholics do...

...His was a difficult position...

...the placing of a wreath on the Pulaski monument...

...But his limited facilities were no match for the mighty military resources of the Russian empire, and despite the patriotic fervor which he inspired in his people, and his military genius which won him a reputation throughout Europe, the revolt was doomed to fail...

...Hall does not mean quite what would be intended by the word retreat as we use it, for he wants a place more like the Summer School, where men could throw off all care, and study to know themselves...

...666 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, I929 After the battle, in which Count d'Estaing was among the wounded and the famous Sergeant Jasper killed, Pulaski was conveyed to the brig Wasp, a privately owned vessel...

...To remain in his native land would have meant to forfeit his life, so we next find him aiding the Turks in their sallies against his foe...

...His father, Count Pulaski, was ~t noted Polish jurist and educated him for the bar...

...Falling on my knees, I tried to raise him...

...Despite the best attention of the surgeons of the French army, he breathed his last as the vessel was leaving the Savannah River for the open sea on its way to Charleston...

...Manifestly Mr...

...For the first few minutes all went well ; we sped like knights into the peril...

...Further exercises included a great military parade, with local and national military units from posts in the Southeast participating...

...It is when they are working, as Goethe said, "Ohne Hast ohne Rast," that men have the peace of mind to think deeply enough so as to get at the supreme significance of their thoughts...

...Early in the battle Pulaski glimpsed an opening in the enemy's works...

...The young officer made a splendid impression on Washington at the Battle of Brandywine and two weeks later, in the middle of September, he was commissioned to command the cavalry, with the rank of brigadier-general...

...I,OOO of them, most of them Catholics, sacrificed their lives that day...

...Pulaski's successor as commander of the cavalry was another Catholic, General Stephen Moylan, with whom his relations had not been particularly cordial...

...He was popular at the court of France, and it was not long before he set sail for America bearing a warm letter of introduction from the American envoy in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, to General Washington, written under date of May 29, 1777...

...Further than this I know not, for at that moment a musket ball grazing my scalp, blinded me with blood, and I fell on the ground in a state of insensibility...

...Just, however, as we passed the gap between the two batteries a cross-fire, llke a pouring shower, confused our ranks...

...At one time, besieged in a monastery, he succeeded with his small force in holding the Russians at bay for weeks, and finally escaped...

...Pulaski's religion was not forgotten...

...Major Rogowski, wounded at the side of Pulaski, describes the scene: Imploring the help of the Almighty, Pulaski shouted to his men, "Forward" and we, 200 strong, rode at full speed after him--the earth resounding under the hoofs of our chargers...

...his reply was Themselves...

...Through the treachery of one of his supposed allies, the elder Pulaski was soon in the prison in which he died in 1769...

...the city's first Pulaski Day was March 25, I825, when Lafayette laid the corner-stone of a monument to him at Chippewa Square...

...After some months of comparative inactivity guarding northwest New Jersey from Indian attacks, Pulaski, impatient, succeeded in having his corps ordered to South Carolina, where his courageous insistence prevented Charleston from being handed over to the enemy in the spring of 1779 . The next and closing chapter in his life was the fateful siege of Savannah...

...The younger Pulaski in a series of brilliant marches organized the greater part of Poland and Lithuania behind the revolt...

...Men who seem dull and commonplace are often so only because of the soul-killing conditions under which they must live...

...Some officers resented his appointment...

...he received his military training in the guard of Charles, Duke of Courland...