The battle of Powenduny and Worna, in which we had beaten the Russians in four positions, and which cost the enemy more than a thousand men, including prisoners and wounded, renewed our hopes. We were expecting, as we have said, new accessions of strength at Polonga; and we were not without hope that our other corps under Dembinski and Chlapowski, who could not have been far distant, finding that we had been thus engaged and so successfully, with the whole force of the enemy, would change their plan of operations, and attack him in his rear or his flank. To this end, in fact, on the very morning of that battle, after our first successes, we sent two officers in the direction of Dembinski and Chlapowski, to apprize them of the circumstances in which we were placed, and especially to inform them of the important fact that the whole force of the enemy were before us. With these hopes awakened in our minds, our disappointment may be imagined on learning, at Retow, that the corps of general Chlapowski had passed through that place on the day before, in a rapid march towards the Prussian frontier. During the battle of Powenduny, therefore, the corps of general Chlapowski was at the distance of only _four miles_ from us. He heard our fire during the whole day, but instead of marching to our support, which, as we afterwards learnt, his officers and even his soldiers loudly called upon him to do, he declined doing it, answering their appeals in the following terms:--"What do you ask of me, gentlemen? I can assure you that the corps of general Rohland, on whom the whole force of the enemy has fallen, is destroyed. The baggage of his officers have passed through Retow.[79] All is lost, and, surrounded as we are on all sides by the enemy, it only remains for us to seek at once the frontiers of Prussia, and to throw ourselves upon the protection of that power." Generals Rohland and Szymanowski, on receiving the unwelcome intelligence of the course which general Chlapowski had adopted, concluded to change their plan of operations, and instead of going to Polonga, to follow the march of general Chlapowski, to endeavor to join him as soon as possible, and by exhibiting to him the unimpaired strength of our corps, which he had believed to be annihilated, to induce him to abandon the project of crossing the Prussian frontier, and to make some farther attempts in junction with us.