At three o'clock the generals, many of whom were wounded, and most of whom had their horses shot under them, and fought on foot at the head of their divisions, resolved upon a retrograde movement, so as to draw the Russians on the open plain. Diebitsch, supposing it to be a flight, looked over to the city and exclaimed, "Well, then, it appears that, after this bloody day, I shall take tea in the Belvidere Palace." The Russian troops debouched from the forest. A cloud of Russian cavalry, with several regiments of heavy cuirassiers at their head, advanced to the attack. Colonel Pientka, who had kept up an unremitting fire from his battery for five hours, seated with perfect sang-froid upon a disabled piece of cannon, remained to give another effective fire, then left at full gallop a post which he had so long occupied under the terrible fire of the enemy's artillery. This rapid movement of his battery animated the Russian forces. The cavalry advanced on a trot upon the line of a battery of rockets. A terrible discharge was poured into their ranks, and the horses, galled to madness by the flakes of fire, became wholly ungovernable, and broke away, spreading disorder in every direction; the whole body swept helplessly along the fire of the Polish infantry, and in a few minutes was so completely annihilated that, of a regiment of cuirassiers who bore inscribed on their helmets the "Invincibles," not a man escaped. The wreck of the routed cavalry, pursued by the lancers, carried along in its flight the columns of infantry; a general retreat commenced, and the cry of "Poland for ever" reached the walls of Warsaw to cheer the hearts of its anxious inhabitants. So terrible was the fire of that day, that in the Polish army there was not a single general or staff officer who had not his horse killed or wounded under him; two thirds of the officers, and, perhaps, of the soldiers, had their clothes pierced with balls, and more than a tenth part of the army were wounded. Thirty thousand Russians and ten thousand Poles were left on the field of battle; rank upon rank lay prostrate on the earth, and the Forest of Elders was so strewed with bodies that it received from that day the name of the "Forest of the Dead." The Czar heard with dismay, and all Europe with astonishment, that the crosser of the Balkan had been foiled under the walls of Warsaw.