The battle of Grokow, the greatest in Europe since that of Waterloo, was fought on the twenty-fifth of February, 1831, and the place where I stood commanded a view of the whole ground. The Russian army was under the command of Diebitsch, and consisted of one hundred and forty-two thousand infantry, forty thousand cavalry, and three hundred and twelve pieces of cannon. This enormous force was arranged in two lines of combatants, and a third of reserve. Its left wing, between Wavre and the marshes of the Vistula, consisted of four divisions of infantry of forty-seven thousand men, three of cavalry of ten thousand five hundred, and one hundred and eight pieces of cannon; the right consisted of three and a half divisions of infantry of thirty-one thousand men, four divisions of cavalry of fifteen thousand seven hundred and fifty men, and fifty-two pieces of cannon. Upon the borders of the great forest opposite the Forest of Elders, conspicuous from where I stood, was placed the reserve, commanded by the Grand-duke Constantine. Against this immense army the Poles opposed less than fifty thousand men and a hundred pieces of cannon, under the command of General Skrzynecki.
At break of day the whole force of the Russian right wing, with a terrible fire of fifty pieces of artillery and columns of infantry, charged the Polish left with the determination of carrying it by a single and overpowering effort. The Poles, with six thousand five hundred men and twelve pieces of artillery, not yielding a foot of ground, and knowing they could hope for no succour, resisted this attack for several hours, until the Russians slackened their fire. About ten o'clock the plain was suddenly covered with the Russian forces issuing from the cover of the forest, seeming one undivided mass of troops. Two hundred pieces of cannon, posted on a single line, commenced a fire which made the earth tremble, and was more terrible than the oldest officers, many of whom had fought at Marengo and Austerlitz, had ever beheld. The Russians now made an attack upon the right wing; but foiled in this as upon the left, Diebitsch directed the strength of his army against the Forest of Elders, hoping to divide the Poles into two parts. One hundred and twenty pieces of cannon were brought to bear on this one point, and fifty battalions, incessantly pushed to the attack, kept up a scene of massacre unheard of in the annals of war. A Polish officer who was in the battle told me that the small streams which intersected the forest were so choked with dead that the infantry marched directly over their bodies. The heroic Poles, with twelve battalions, for four hours defended the forest against the tremendous attack. Nine times they were driven out, and nine times, by a series of admirably-executed manoeuvres, they repulsed the Russians with immense loss. Batteries, now concentrated in one point, were in a moment hurried to another, and the artillery advanced to the charge like cavalry, sometimes within a hundred feet of the enemy's columns, and there opened a murderous fire of grape.