The White Eagle of Poland

by E. F. Benson

CHAPTER V

(i) THE POLISH LEGIONS

Of the various factors with had produced this crisis by far the most important from the German standpoint was the utter failure to induce Poland to furnish Germany with an army. The German authorities had tried to raise it themselves and had succeeded in enlisting 600 fit men, when they had hoped to raise between 700,000 and 800,000. But they believed that one man was able to raise this army for them, and this was Pilsudski, whom they had now imprisoned, despairing of success, on the charge of conspiracy. He had not conspired at all: he had but consistently refused to conspire or to exercise the huge moral force which he had in Poland, in the matter of raising an army, unless (as we have seen) that army was intended to be the defence and shield of a Polish independent State, which the German authorities, up till the present time had refused to call into existence, or to grant it a Constitution that was anything more than a swindle. A very brief résumé of the history of this remarkable patriot, and of the legions which he had created will help the reader to understand how great was the prestige with which the Germans rightly credited him, and how significant to them were the Polish legions which he had raised at the beginning of the war.

Pilsudski was a Lithuanian Pole, and his father, like himself, was a sturdy Polish patriot. As a student in Petrograd he joined the Socialistic movement, and was deported to Siberia. He came back, having escaped from there, in the early nineties, and leaving Russia, became a founder of the Polish Socialist Party, the first that included the struggle for Polish independence in its programme. He spent some years as an emigrant in London, where he published the organ of the Polish Socialist Party. In 1904 he went to Japan, and, unsuccessfully tried to get the assistance of the Japanese Government in organizing an armed rising in Poland against Russia. He returned from there to Russian Poland, where he was the leader of a revolutionary movement, was again arrested and imprisoned at St. Petersburg. Once more he escaped, and settled in Galicia. After the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, when Austria was preparing for war against Russia, he came into contact with the Austrian staff and offered to raise a volunteer legion on their behalf. He began to organize this in 1911, three years before the outbreak of the present war. It consisted mainly of Socialistic emigrants from Russian Poland, many of whom were trained as officers with the help of the Austrian military authorities. When the war broke out, the legion was put on an official basis. Pilsudski was appointed to its command, and both his staff and the rank and file were Polish Socialists, largely young men studying in Galicia, who had come under the influence of Pilsudski’s propaganda, but a considerable number of Austrians joined it also.

As a military leader Pilsudski shewed marked ability; politically, his inspiration was his whole-hearted hatred of the old Russian regime of Tsarism, and thus owing both to his qualities and their defects he could not analyse the peculiar difficulties of the Polish question generally, or see that Germany was just as strong an opponent of Polish liberty as Russia, and infinitely the more insidious. To this patriotic Pole living in territory grabbed by Russia from the ancient Republic, Russia was the obvious enemy. He had no sympathies for any powers either on the side of the Central Empires or on that of the Entente: his only motive was to fight the enemies of Poland. Poland was encircled by foes, and it really mattered little to Pilsudski what segment of that circle he originally “went for,” provided only that he hurled himself, like a wild cat, at something hostile. He appears to have made up his mind, years before the war, that Russia, anyhow, was a foe to his fatherland, and he rated the proclamation of the Grand Duke Nicholas at precisely its proper value. Indeed it might have been of him, as the incarnation of the Polish national spirit, that a Russian, Professor Bierdiayew, said: “The Poles do not want Russian sympathy and friendship, but their own independence.... The Polish question is not and cannot be a Russian problem for them: it is a matter of their own, and at the same time a matter that should concern the whole world.... It is more than obvious that for a Pole the future arrangements for Poland cannot be part of the future arrangements of Russia or Germany or Austria. For them there is no Russian or Austrian orientation. They do not want their freedom as a reward from anybody ... Poland is not in decadence; it is at the height of its vitality and strength.... Poles have no Russian or Austrian orientation, only a Polish one....”

Pilsudski was always ready to take the “best chance” for the independence of Poland (as when in 1904 he went to Japan and offered on behalf of the Socialists to organize an armed rising in Poland against Russia) and thus, since Russia at the outbreak of war was the wrongful holder of Lithuania and Poland, he raised the legions to fight against the most conspicuous opponent of Polish independence. Whatever Power, be it Russian or German, was in possession of Poland, that Power was Pilsudski’s enemy, and he always “went for” his enemy. This undeviating purpose invariably dictated his course.

As such he was the first to lead troops into Russian territory, and at the opening of the war made a skirmishing advance out of Galicia into Russia on the side of the Austrians. He was recalled, as leading an “irregular body,” and in order to regularise that irregular body, the Austrian command found it somehow reasonable to embody him and his legions in their regular army. There they remained till December, 1915, partaking in the Austrian retreat and, subsequently, in its advance. By this time the Germans had taken possession—though largely with Austrian troops—of the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, and had seen the potentiality of Pilsudski in the way of raising a Polish army, consisting not merely of the legions, who were a body of a very few thousand men, but of a Polish force, consisting, so they hoped, not of a few thousand men, but of at least 700,000, to fight in the interests not of Austria nor of Poland, but of Germany. With this in view Germany managed, without detaching the Polish legions from the Austrian army, to include them in the general advance to the Stokhod front in December, 1915. There they served till the late summer of 1916, when Pilsudski, after constant friction with Bernhardi, who was the German commander of that section, suddenly refused to serve there any more, and, by flat mutiny, withdrew on August 28th a number of his troops from the front and marched them back to Warsaw. That there had been friction between him and Bernhardi there was no doubt, but the reason for his withdrawal of himself and his division was a much more honourable and consistent motive: it was in fact his invariable purpose of fighting the most obvious of Poland’s foes that dictated it. For a year now, Germany, and in a minor degree Austria, had been in possession of Poland, and had altogether shelved the question of Polish independence. It was for that alone that Pilsudski cared, and his mutiny was without doubt due to political motives. At any cost he wanted Polish independence, and he transgressed every code of military discipline in order to provoke a political crisis. Just as, when the Russians were in possession of Poland, he fought against the Russians: so now, when the Germans were in possession, he refused to fight against the Russians. But in each case his motive was perfectly clear: he would not support an enemy of Poland, and his action, doubtless, contributed to induce Germany to declare the independence of Poland.

It says volumes for the value which the Germans attached to him and his influence that he was not instantly shot for this mutiny. But they knew perfectly well that if any one could raise a Polish army for them it was Pilsudski, and instead of shooting him, both of the Central Empires tried to make friends with him. In September, 1916, just after his mutiny and retirement with his troops, it was announced from Vienna (Wiener Korrespondenz Bureau) that the Polish legions were going to be transformed into a Polish Auxiliary Corps. So far from being shot as mutinous they were recognised as the cadres of a Polish army, to guard the State which the Central Empires were proposing to create. Instead of having their badges torn off them and being laid in nameless graves they were given a Polish uniform with the ancient Polish badge of the White Eagle. “They will depend,” so ran the official proclamation, “in matters of tactics on the High Command of the armies of the Central Empires, but they will be independent as regards their own organisation, and they will fight in conjunction with the Austro-Hungarian army.”

But until the success of this diplomacy was assured the Central Empires thought it wiser that Pilsudski should be in retirement, and for the next month “for the sake of his health” he was inaccessible at Zeleopane, under the guise of a rest cure. That was all the punishment inflicted on him for the rankest mutiny, and while he was “resting” the Polish legions in October, 1916, passed a resolution to do their duty on behalf of an independent Poland and to stand by Pilsudski. In fact, the nucleus for a Polish army refused to help the Central Empires in any way until they had got their Pilsudski again. Next month, accordingly (November, 1916) he was rested and reappeared. His mutiny had been completely successful: he had forced the Central Empires to promise to let him form an army of the Polish State. But at that point there broke across the common path an unbridgeable chasm, for the Germans wanted a Polish army to help Germany, and Pilsudski never contemplated such a thing. If he was to raise a Polish army, that army would be raised for Poland and Poland alone.

On the eve (literally the eve) of the German and Austrian declaration of the “State of Poland,” Pilsudski declared in favour of the breaking up of the Polish legions, and of the using of them as cadres for the formation of a Polish army. He professed himself able to raise an army of 700,000 men, but this would depend on the nature of the imminent declaration of independence. Here again, now that Germany and Austria were in possession of Poland, he was “up against” the occupying Powers, for they on their side declared that Poland must prove herself worthy of independence, by shedding her blood on behalf of Germany. The legions by the mouth of Pilsudski refused to do anything of the kind. But still Pilsudski was neither interned nor arrested nor shot. The Central Empires considered him as their most valuable asset as a recruiter, if they could only get him to see “eye to eye” with them.