“To the forest!”

“To the forest!” is the cry through which Lipce’s scattered grievances become a collective act. As a summons, it calls villagers to defend the woodland the manor is felling; as a repeated refrain, it transforms anger over land, work, and ignored complaints into a public claim of shared rights. Its force lies not in a single speaker’s authority alone, but in the moment when a village answers and moves together.

From alarm to assembly

The phrase first breaks into the uneasy dawn after a night of feverish sleep, fearful dreams, and suspicion of burglars. As soon as day begins, Antek runs to the bell tower and rings the bell as though there has been a fire. Ambrozy and the organist try to stop him, but he swears and continues. The bell’s slow, ceaseless toll draws frightened residents from their cottages; Mateusz, Kobus, and others run through the village, striking fences with sticks and shouting, “To the forest! To the forest! Come out, everyone! Meet by the inn! To the forest!” The phrase is thus coupled with instructions: assemble, leave home, and join the others.

The summons makes a threatened resource dispute audible throughout the village. People dress in haste, some still fastening clothes or finishing prayers as they run. The roads and farmyards fill; women call across gardens, children raise a commotion, and the gathering grows in the square before the inn. They wait for the elders, who have gone to fetch Boryna, because he is the first farmer in the village and the others expect him to lead. The expression does not erase hierarchy: the crowd assembles before its recognized leader arrives. But it creates the assembly in which that leadership can be demanded and exercised.

Boryna gives the cry its public claim

When Boryna reaches the inn, the villagers call on him to lead. The repeated “To the forest!” is both a response to his arrival and the immediate purpose of the meeting. In his address, Boryna names the injuries behind the mobilization: the manor is felling the forest, has refused employment to the villagers, and has repeatedly harried them and driven them toward ruin. He recalls confiscations and grievances taken to court or raised in complaints without result. The contested woods are the “last straw,” not an isolated cause detached from the village’s wider sense of injustice.

Boryna’s speech recasts the cry as a justification for action. He tells the crowd that they must defend what is theirs together, that this is their right, will, and justice, and urges every person able to move to follow him. The villagers answer “To the forest!” and then disperse briefly to prepare. They fetch scythes, flails, rods, and axes, harness horses, and bring out sleighs and carts. Peasants, farmhands, women, and older children set out together; some ride, while many go on foot. Their equipment and ranks differ, but the repeated cry gathers them into one advancing body.

The cry carried into the woods

At the forest clearing, the villagers arrive in a dense crowd and swoop on the woodcutters. Boryna leaps from his sleigh and rushes forward at their head. Others follow with sticks, pitchforks, and flails; some carry scythes or branches, while the women join with cries and their fingernails. Their overlapping shouts initially make their demand difficult to distinguish. Then Boryna stops beside the petrified woodcutters and calls for the people from Modlica, Rzepki, and elsewhere to listen. The villagers’ claim becomes explicit in the cry, “Stop! Get out of the forest! It’s ours!”

The movement from bell to inn to clearing gives the expression a changing function. At first it is an alarm and an invitation to assemble; at the inn it becomes assent to Boryna’s appeal; in the woods it accompanies direct resistance to the felling. The words do not settle the competing claims by themselves. They do, however, make the villagers’ opposition unmistakable, joining a locally asserted right to a coordinated attempt to stop the work.

A village voice with political limits

The phrase resonates with the novel’s broader question of whether peasants can become a political community. The historical discussion of Polish national identity describes the effort to build such a consciousness among former serfs and stresses the political significance of Polish Romanticism. The novel’s village action gives that question a concrete, local form: Boryna addresses “Christian folk, honest Poles, farmers and hired hands,” bringing religious identity, national language, and divisions of rural status into one appeal. The forest cry gathers people who share a grievance without making their social differences disappear.

That collective voice is powerful but not equivalent to a lasting political institution. Later, amid debate over the proposed school, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and turning people against officials. When gendarmes arrive in another confrontation, the crowd closes around them, then parts to let them through and surges after them in anger. A voice in that crowd says, “Every creature has its own tongue, but only we are ordered to use another’s.” These moments place the forest mobilization alongside later disputes about authority, language, and the villagers’ capacity to act together; they do not repeat its specific cry. “To the forest!” remains the sharpest expression of a shared demand in the face of the manor’s felling: a call that briefly makes the village’s claim audible, organized, and visible in the woods.