What was most infuriating was that the Russian army had no way to deal with the hot-air balloons in the sky. All they could do was charge over in a mass and cut the enemy's tethers, or pull the balloons back down to the ground.
Rockets made all the Russian army's years of effort go to waste. Unless a building was made of stone, neither barracks nor warehouses could escape the rockets' baptism of fire.
The British rockets' direct lethality was far inferior to that of round cannonballs, but their destructive power was several times greater.
In truth, the Russians had only themselves to blame. Their camps and fortifications were often designed too crudely. Though they had ordinary stone walls and bastions around the perimeter, the interiors were usually filled with wooden buildings, and lacked adequate fire prevention measures and necessary cellars.
Under normal circumstances, or in the past, this would have posed no problem. But when the enemy deployed large numbers of rockets, it was all too easy for the inside of a fortification to be burned to bare earth.
Regular troops deprived of supplies often collapsed faster than militia, because they knew what it meant. Militia might still hope for a miracle, but regular troops would only choose between surrender and fighting to the death.
War was cruel to both sides. The Russian army's tremendous losses were piled atop the bones of countless Poles. What was more, to civilians, the Russian army had always been a nightmare, and the Polish battlefield was no exception.
There were plenty of instances on the Polish battlefield of the Russian army using Poles as human shields. The massacres of people in certain cities, villages, and towns had never stopped either.
The Poles were just as ruthless in their efforts to kill Russians.