The Battle of Ostrołęka was fought on 26 May 18312, during the November Uprising against Russian rule. After a failed attempt to destroy the Russian Guard, General Jan Skrzynecki's main Polish army was crossing the Narew at Ostrołęka when Field Marshal Diebitsch's army fell on it. Polish troops, above all the famous 4th Infantry Regiment, fought for the burning town, but the Russians took it and forced their way across the bridges. All afternoon Skrzynecki sent his divisions to throw them back, at heavy cost. In the evening Lieutenant Colonel Józef Bem's horse battery galloped forward and checked the Russians, and that night the Polish army withdrew towards Warsaw.
By the spring of 1831 the Polish uprising against Russia had won battles but not the war. In May its commander-in-chief led the main army north-east against the Russian Guard. On 26 May, at a wooden town on the Narew called Ostrołęka, that army was caught halfway across the river.
A campaign against the Guard
The November Uprising had broken out in Warsaw in November 1830, and in February 1831 the Polish army halted the Russian advance on Warsaw at Olszynka Grochowska. After the spring offensive victories at Wawer, Dębe Wielkie and Iganie, the Polish commander-in-chief, General Jan Skrzynecki, came under pressure from public opinion to act. In May he marched against the Russian Guard north-east of Warsaw, but missed the chance to strike it near Śniadowo, and the Guard escaped towards Białystok.
Caught at the river
Meanwhile Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch marched with the main Russian army to cut Skrzynecki off from Warsaw. On the evening of 25 May the Poles began crossing the Narew3 at Ostrołęka. The next morning, while part of the army was still on the far side, Russian columns attacked General Tomasz Łubieński's division and General Ludwik Bogusławski's troops, among them the celebrated 4th Infantry Regiment, the Czwartacy.
The fight for the bridges
The defenders fought in the streets of the burning town, but the Russians took Ostrołęka and stormed across the bridges, which the Poles had not managed to destroy. Russian guns on the high bank swept the Polish positions. All afternoon Skrzynecki threw division after division at the Russians who had crossed, trying to drive them back into the river. The attacks gained ground and then broke under artillery fire, and two Polish generals, Ludwik Kicki and Henryk Kamieński, were killed.1
Bem's battery
In the evening, as the Russians prepared to advance again, Lieutenant Colonel Józef Bem brought his 4th Horse Artillery Battery forward at a gallop3 to very close range and opened fire. By many accounts its fire, kept up for about half an hour under Russian counter-battery fire, halted the Russian columns and helped persuade Diebitsch that fresh Polish reserves were close by. After dark Skrzynecki's council of war decided to withdraw, and the army marched back towards Warsaw. Diebitsch did not pursue, and about two weeks later he died of cholera.
Why Ostrołęka mattered
Ostrołęka cost the Polish army several thousand of its best infantry, and with it the initiative in the war; in September Warsaw fell.4 Yet the stand of the 4th Regiment and Bem's charge became legends, and the German poet Julius Mosen immortalised the regiment in a poem about its last ten survivors crossing into exile in Prussia5. A mausoleum to the fallen stands in Ostrołęka1, and the battle is inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.