The Puławy Legion at Pakosław

On the evening of 19 May 1915 the Puławy Legion, the first Polish volunteer unit in the Russian army, set off on a night attack on the German trenches near the village of Pakosław (PL), a few kilometres north-west of Iłża (PL). It was its baptism of fire. According to Polish studies, of the 493 soldiers who went into the attack, 42 were killed, 60 wounded and 11 went missing. Today the fight is commemorated by a plaque on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw reading “Pakosław 19–20 V 1915”.

On the front near Iłża

Officially the unit was no longer called a legion. Since February it had been the 739th Novo-Aleksandriya Druzhina of the State Militia, because the Russians had banned the name “Polish Legion”, although the legionaries themselves went on using it. It numbered about a thousand men, of whom roughly 800 were armed. On 20 March Lieutenant Colonel Antoni Reutt (PL) led it to the front. The druzhina was attached to the Grenadier Corps, whose positions ran along the eastern edge of the Pakosław marshes, from Michałów to Pakosław. From mid-May the German 4th Landwehr Division tried in vain to push the Russians out of them. In the south, after the breakthrough at Gorlice, the Russian army was already in retreat. The legion was stationed at Krzyżanowice, about 3 kilometres north of Iłża.

The night attack

The order told the legionaries to cross the marshes and strike the German trenches. They left behind their packs and anything that could give them away; smoking and talking were forbidden. At about 9 p.m. the companies went into the bog. When they came close to the German trenches, they charged straight into machine-gun fire. The two leading platoons cut through the wire and took a stretch of trench, where a bayonet fight followed. Their commander fell, and the platoons, having lost about three quarters of their men, had to fall back. Reutt himself led the 4th Company, but German reinforcements came up and four further attacks broke down. He then ordered a withdrawal, which was carried out under fire. Reutt was wounded in the fighting.

Wojciech Jerzy Muszyński, the historian of the Polish formations in Russia, writes that the Russian regiments that were to support the Poles did not leave their trenches, and the legion was left alone against a much stronger enemy. He calls Pakosław “a small Lenino of the First World War”, by analogy with the Battle of Lenino (PL) of 1943. German losses are not known.

After Pakosław

The legion was withdrawn to the second line, around Krzyżanowice and Starosiedlice, for rest and training. The front near Iłża froze for almost a month. Command passed to Colonel Jan Rządkowski (PL). In mid-June near Michałów the 4th Company held its sector for about 18 hours, and a counter-attack by Rządkowski with a Russian rifle battalion forced the Germans to withdraw. At the end of June the front near Iłża collapsed and the Russians began to fall back. The legion, reinforced with soldiers from the disbanded Lublin Legion (PL), covered the Russian army’s retreat from the Kingdom. Its bloodiest clash with Poles fighting on the side of the Central Powers came then, in two days of fighting at Karczówka near Łosice (PL). It fought for the last time at Zelva in September. Of about a thousand men, 7 officers and 105 NCOs and privates remained. In the autumn the remnants of the legion were sent to Bobruisk, where they joined the newly formed Polish Rifle Brigade.

In the 1920s the remains of the legionaries were gathered from the battlefields and buried in a common grave by the Pakosław manor farm, over which a monument to the fallen was raised.