After the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw from the territories captured by Napoleon, he moved with his parents to Kraków, where after finishing military school (where he distinguished himself in mathematics) he joined the ducal forces as a fifteen-year-old cadet.

[3] After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Duchy of Warsaw was transformed into the constitutional Kingdom of Poland, a dependent territory of the Russian Empire, and Bem became a teacher at a military college.

Bem became involved in a political conspiracy to restore Poland to full independence, but, when his membership in a secret patriotic organisation was discovered, he was demoted and sentenced (in 1822) to one year in prison.

Nonetheless, the Polish army was eventually compelled to lay down arms on 5 October 1831, and crossed the Russian–Prussian partitional border under the command of General Maciej Rybiński in the Great Emigration.

[8] In France, he published his next work, on the national uprising in Poland, in which he not only gave an appraisal of the 1831 insurrection, but also tried to present a programme for the continuation of the struggle for the country's freedom.

First he attempted to hold Vienna against the imperial troops of Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz, and, after the capitulation, hastened to Pressburg (Hungarian: Pozsony, today Bratislava, Slovakia) to offer his services to Lajos Kossuth, first defending himself, in a long speech, from the accusations of "treachery to the Polish cause" and "aristocratic tendencies" — which the more fanatical section of the Polish émigré Radicals repeatedly brought against him.

He was entrusted with the defence of Transylvania at the end of 1848,[11] and in 1849, as General of the Székely troops, he performed miracles with his little army, notably at the bridge of Piski (now Simeria, Romania) on 9 February, where, after fighting all day, he drove back an immense force of pursuers.

He fought a fresh action at Nagycsür (now Șura Mare) on 6 August, and contrived to bring his fragmented army to the Battle of Temesvár (now Timișoara),[13] to aid the hard-pressed General Henryk Dembiński.

On 6 July in the morning, after the construction of a special scaffolding, the coffin was lifted with cranes to the top of the mausoleum and placed in the sarcophagus, and the side wall was bricked up.

[16][17][18] A statue to his honour was erected at Marosvásárhely (now Târgu-Mureş, Romania) but he lives still more enduringly in the verses[19] of the Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi, who fell in the fatal action of 31 July 1849 at the Battle of Segesvár.

Since 1969 Czesław Niemen's Bema pamięci żałobny rapsod (Mourner's Rhapsody in Memory of Bem) became cult status in Central Europe and also beyond the Iron Curtain.

[25] In 1974 an English version was re-recorded with the help of Michał Urbaniak, John Abercrombie, Jan Hammer, Rick Laird and Don Grolnick, which was published worldwide by CBS Records International.