By the close of 1918 the interventionist forces in Russia had reached a total of nearly 30,000 men — French, British, Americans, Italians, Japanese, German Balts, Poles, Greeks, Finns, Czechs, Slovaks, Estonians and Latvians . . . In April, 1919, Kolchak reached Kazan and Samara on the Volga, while Denekin advanced northward from the Black Sea. As Kolchak was considered the more dangerous, Trotsky sent General Tukhachevski against him. . . . Next, in October, an offensive was opened against Denekin . . . He was pushed back, and once in retreat, because of the bandits and partisans who infested his rear communications, was unable to halt his demoralized men until they reached Novorossisk on the Black Sea. From there the remnants of his army were sent to General Wrangel in Crimea. About the same time, General Yudenich, then advancing on Petrograd, was driven over the Estonian border, and intervention began to collapse. Two Powers were unwilling to give in ; Japan, who had her eyes on territorial expansion in eastern Siberia, and France.
Because the French feared to lose the credits they had advanced Tsarist Russia, and that, in revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans would link up with the Bolsheviks, their policy was contradictory. One aim was to restore the Tsarist régime, which would be grateful to France, and the other was to create an enlarged Poland which as a French ally would threaten Germany from the east.
On November 4, 1916, the independence of Poland had been sanctioned by the Central Powers, and when on November 11, 1918, they collapsed, the Regency Council established by them appointed Joseph Pilsudski (1867-1936) to the supreme command of all Polish troops. His first act was to declare himself head of the National Government, and his second to notify all belligerent and neutral Powers that Poland was an independent state.
Pilsudski, assured of French good will, credits, and munitions, needed little encouragement to make enormous territorial claims,* for the key-note of his foreign policy was to restore the Polish frontiers of 1772 — roughly the line of the Dvina and Dnieper — and to make Poland the head of an anti-Bolshevik confederation.
In April, 1919, he invaded Lithuania, stormed Lida and occupied Vilna. In May he invaded east Galicia, which had been proclaimed a West Ukrainian Republic by General Petliura who, in November, 1918, had become head of the Ukrainian National Government.
* "Various motives were attributed to Pilsudski . . . All he wanted was to win back for Poland that which had been taken from her. But he had another deeper reason, his fear and distrust of Bolshevism, which he believed would destroy any state in which it took root." (Aleksandra Pilsudska, Pilsudski, London, 1941, pp. 295-6). — (WPT).
Because the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers took little heed of these campaigns and failed to appreciate what manner of man Pilsudski was, on December 8, it fixed the eastern frontier of Poland along the line of the river Bug, and in the following year it became known as the "Curzon Line".* It in no way satisfied Pilsudski, and soon after it was suggested the situation in the Ukraine grew so critical that, in the spring of 1920, Petliura came to terms with Pilsudski, and on April 22, peace between then was signed at Warsaw. Poland recognized the independence of the Ukraine and undertook to support the Ukrainians against Russia.
( vol. iii, pages 337-8 )
* Originally, Lord Curzon had little to do with said Line, the denomination was foisted on him with some sort of sleigh-of-hand by M. Lloyd George. — (WPT).
CHAPTER
9
The Battle of Warsaw, 1920
The civil war in Russia threw up one remarkable general — Mikhail Tuchachevski. An able soldier, his outlook on civilization closely reflected the Asiatic side of Bolshevism.
Born in 1892 of a noble family which traced its descent back to the Counts of Flanders, although his mother was an Italian, in character he was Tartar. From her he inherited his Latin looks, black hair, and the quick wit which enabled him to probe the Russian within him and the Tartar within the Russian. In 1914 he was gazetted a sub-lieutenant in the Imperial Guard, and in the following years was taken prisoner by the Germans.
By instinct he was a romantic barbarian who abhorred western civilization. He hated Christianity and Christian culture because they had obliterated paganism and barbarism and had deprived his fellow countrymen of the ecstasy of the god of war and the glamour of �the carnival of death.� Also he loathed the Jews because they had helped inoculate the Russians with �the pest of civilization� and �the morale of capitalism�. 1
When he was incarcerated at Ingolstadt, he said to Fervacque, a fellow prisoner : �A demon or a god animates our race. We shall make ourselves drunk, because we cannot as yet make the world drunk. That will come.�2 Once Fervacque found him painting in discordant colours on a piece of cardboard the head of an atrocious idol. What is that ? he asked him. �Do not laugh,� replied Tukhachevski, �I have told you that the Slavs are in want of a new religion. They are being given Marxism ; but aspects of that
theology are too modern and too civilized. It is possible to mitigate that disagreeable state by returning to our Slav gods, who were deprived of their prerogative and strength ; nevertheless they can soon regain them. There is Daschbog, the god of the sun ; Stribog, the god of the storm ; Wolos, the god of human arts and of poetry ; and also Pierounn, the god of war and of lightning. For long I have hesitated to choose my particular god ; but, after reflection, have accepted Pierounn,* because once Marxism is thrust upon Russia, the most devastating wars will be let loose. . . . We shall enter chaos and we shall not leave it until civilization is reduced to total ruin.�[3]
1 Le chef de l�armée rouge, Mikail Tukachevski, Pierre Fervacque (1928), p. 24.
2 Ibid., p. 67.
[3] Ibid., pp. 73-75.
In his eyes, destruction justified everything because it unlocked the door which led to the road back to Seljuk, Tartar and Hun.
* The Aryan (Indo-European) Slav Pierounn (Polish piorun) and the Aryan-Teutonic Thor (confer Thor's Day, Thursday) originally were one word for one sort of phenomena, namely, lightning and thunder.
If the given reports are accurate, Mr. Tukhachevski was much confused on the general ethno-cultural or ethno-linguistic matters. His gods were Slav — Aryan (also called Indo-European) — gods while his heroes were Turanian — of a fundamentally distinct group.
The data coming by way of Fervacque (French) and Fuller (English) — a third-order remove so to speak — the possibility looms of alterations "in transit". It would seem negligible importance to the context, the Battle of Warsaw 1920 and its consequences. — (WPT).
In 1937 Stalin shot him, and in goodly company.
This strange volcanic man, whose soul was in revolt with civilization, was destined to cross swords with Pilsudski, who was as violently anti-Russian as he was violently anti-European.* Of the latter, Lord D�Abernon, who had exceptional opportunities to watch him, says: �An ardent patriot and a man of immense courage and force of character. A pronounced sceptic about
orthodox methods, whether applied to military affairs or politics ; he loves danger, his pulse only beating at a normal rate when he is in imminent personal peril. . . . Next to danger, he is said to love intrigue — a revolutionary by temperament and circumstances (etc).�1
* From other sources (mainly General de Wiart) I gather that Pilsudski had visited England and had a relatively high opinion on that country�s institutions. He had �no particular liking� for the Germans but during his lifetime �the relations were from all appearances good�. (WPT).
It was these characteristics — courage, unorthodoxy, and secrecy — coupled with success, which made Pilsudski a legendary figure. The day before his death, on May 12, 1935, he turned to General Smigly-Rydz and said to him ; �To be vanquished and not surrender is victory ; to vanquish and rest on laurels is defeat.�2 the first half of this saying sums up his generalship.
Both [the opposing] forces were improvised, chaotically equipped and suffered from over-rapid growth. In November, 1918, when Pilsudski assumed command, the Polish army consisted of 24 battalions, three squadrons and five batteries ; yet by January, 1919, they had respectively been raised to 100, 70, and 80, in all comprising some 110,000 men. A year later this figure had risen to 600,000, organized in 21 divisions and seven brigades of cavalry ; but most were still in formation. Though manpower was sufficient, Poland possessed no arsenals and lacked munitions.
What of his opponent�s army ? Tukhachevski once said to Fervacque ; �The Russian Army is not like yours — the French. It is a horde, and its strength is that of a horde.�3 Though these words were spoken during the World War, they are equally applicable to the campaign of 1920, because the army which faced Pilsudski was nothing more than a horde of peasants — whose sole idea was to get home4 — leavened with a comparatively small number of fanatical revolutionaries. Though it was better equipped than the Poles — the rounding up of Denekin�s [Denikin�s] and Kolchak�s forces had supplied it with millions of pounds worth of French and British armaments — it was lamentably short of military
transport and trained officers. The former consisted of thousands of peasants� carts, and the deficiency in latter was made good by commissioning hundreds of officers of the old Imperial Army. But as their loyalty was suspect, Trotsky attached commissars to each formation. Most of these men were Jews, and, according to Lord D�Abernon, �they did everything in their divisions — commandeered food — gave orders — explained objectives.�[5]
1 The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, Viscount D�Abernon (1920), pp. 38-39.
2 Quoted from Pilsudski marshal of Poland, Eric J. Patterson (1935), p. 127.
3 Le chef de l�armée rouge, p. 36.
4 See The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, D�Abernon, p. 77.
[5] Ibid., pp. 68, 76.
Both Poles and Russians desperately wanted peace, yet only on their own terms, which were : for the former, the old frontier of 1772 ; for the latter, the continuance of world revolution. So it came about that, when on December 22, 1920 [1919?], the Soviet Government invited the Polish Government to negotiate peace, though the proposal was accepted, nothing came of it.
At length, on April 25, diplomatic fencing was brought to an end by a sudden offensive launched by Pilsudski. Its aim was to seize Kiev, and then to turn northward against Tukhachevski, who faced his left wing. Led by Pilsudski the Polish army, supported on its right by two divisions of Ukrainians under the Hetman Petliura, as well as by some Rumanians, swept towards the Dnieper, and, on May 7, occupied Kiev.
[Various logistic detail.]
Tukhachevski, frantic with revolution, dreamt of watering his horses on the Rhine1, carrying the war into western Europe. At that time, Trotsky, on May 2, made the following forecast :
�There can be no doubt that the war of the Polish bourgeoisie against the Ukrainian and Russian workers and peasants will end with a workers� revolution in Poland. It would be a pitiful lack of spirit to be frightened at the first successes of Pilsudski. The deeper the right wing of the Polish troops penetrates into Ukrainia, the more fatal for the Polish troops will be the concentrated blow which the Red troops will give them.�[2]
1 Le chef de l�armée rouge, Fervacque, p. 123.
[2] History of the Revolution, Trotsky, (1932-35), vol. iii, book 2, p. 102.
Strategically this was correct. On June 5th the Polish Third Army was nearly surrounded, but on the 13th it broke away and retired westward while Budienny�s horsemen swept onward, crossed the Horyn on July 3, and two days later occupied Rovno. From there they pressed forward to the outskirts of Lvov (Lemberg).
As Pilsudski informs us, panic followed. He writes : �For our troops who were not prepared to meet this new offensive instrument, Budienny�s cavalry became an invincible, legendary force. And it should be remembered that the farther in rear one goes, the more does such an obsession escape all reason — to become all-powerful and irresistible. Thus for me began to be created that most dangerous of all fronts — the inner one.�2
2 L�Année 1920, Joseph Pilsudski (1929), p. 51.
When Pilsudski left in retreat, Tukhachevski set about to reorganize his chaotic army. During June he collected and incorporated nearly 100,000 deserters,1 and though he complained bitterly of lack of equipment, the idea upon which he based his forthcoming attack was political rather than military. He considered that �the situation in Poland was favourable to revolution,� and that a powerful rising of the city proletariat and peasants only awaited his arrival �on the ethnographical frontier of Poland.� Further, he thought that Europe was ripe for revolution (etc).� He arrived at these conclusions from exaggerated accounts of the conditions then prevalent : in Germany, where the people only awaited �the signal of revolt� ; in England, where the situation resembled that in Russia in 1904 ; and in Italy, where the workers had occupied the factories and industrial establishments. He launched an advanced guard of propagandists to blaze a trail for his horde.2 On this strategy, Lord D�Abernon writes :
Moscow disposed a host of spies, propagandists, secret emissaries and secret friends, who penetrated into Polish territory, etc. The system adopted was to avoid frontal attack whenever possible, and to turn positions by flank marches, infiltration and propaganda.�3
1 Ibid. [i.e. Pilsudski, 1920], Annexe I, �La marche au dela de la Vistula,� M. Tukhachevski, p. 215.
2 Ibid., pp. 231-232.
3 The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, p. 28. The propaganda cut both ways. Chamberlin points out its discouraging effect on the Red soldiers, when on reaching the outskirts of Warsaw they �learned that there were some workers among the volunteers who were increasing the numbers of the Polish forces against them�. (The Russian Revolution, (1935), vol. ii, p. 317).
Tukhachevski intended to live on the land and his system of supply closely resembled that of Attila or Genghis Khan. Fervacque probably exaggerates when he ways that his 200,000 warriors were followed by a horde of 800,000 politicians, police, and pillagers, whose duty it was to bolshevize the conquered territories, by laying low the
wealthy and shooting the bourgeois and aristocrats.1 Yet his exaggeration is not so great as it appears, because Tukhachevski tells us that his Armies were followed by 33,000 farm carts, and somewhat ironically adds ; �It was a heavy burden for the local inhabitants.�2 This number of carts, at six men a cart approximately adds up to 200,000, and while these men devastated the Soviet rear, propaganda cleared the way on the Soviet front.
What the opposing strengths were at the end of June is problematical. The Polish armies would appear to have numbered approximately 120,000 men and the Soviet 200,000. [Various figures given including.]
When the way had been cleared by propaganda, Tukhachevski launched his four armies into attack at dawn on July 4.
On July 7 the whole Polish front was in full retreat. On the 11th, a battle for Vilna opened. Vilna fell to the Soviet Fourth Army on the 14th, and the Polish situation became still more critical when the Lithuanian Army joined the Bolsheviks. [One Kapsukas had attempted to establish a Bolshevik-style government in Vilna (cf. Rausch). — (WPT)]
1 Le chef de l�armée rouge, p. 124.
2 L�Année 1920, Annexe I, p. 218.
While Pilsudski clutched his retreating armies together, Tukhachevski moved on. On July 18 the latter ordered his Fourth Army to force the Niemen south of Grodno on the 21st, etc ; on the 19th Gay Khan and his horseman occupied Grodno and on the 21st Tukhachevski sent the following message to Moscow :
�Grodno was occupied on the 19th, etc. We can now expect to complete our task in three weeks time.�1
Kamenev was so thrilled by this that he imagined the Poles beaten beyond redemption and suggested the withdrawal of one of Tukhachevski�s four armies in order to build up a reserve.
When Grodno fell, Tukhachevski ordered Warsaw to be occupied on August 12.
1 Ibid., Notes, p. 286.
On August 2 Pilsudski entered Warsaw to learn that the Narew was in his enemy's hands. On the following day Lomza was lost and the whole of the Polish First Army fell back on the capital. Annihilation seemed imminent ; yet again the situation was not without hope, for the rapidity of the Bolshevik advance, nearly 300 miles in 30 days, had so disordered Tukhachevski's supply system that it was near dissolution. The situation was such that Tukhachevski could neither stand still nor retire ; to halt and reorganize was out of the question for it would mean starvation. All he could do was to push on.
Further, the political situation favoured a continuation of the attack. In Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany the workers refused to allow munitions to pass through their countries to Poland. "On August 6 the British Labour Party published a pamphlet which stated that the workers of Great Britain would take no part in the war as allies of Poland." In Paris the French Socialists, through their organ L'Humanité, spoke of a "war against the Soviet Republic by the Polish Government on the orders of Anglo-French Imperialism, and cried 'Not a man, not a sou, not a shell for reactionary and capitalist Poland. Long live the Russian Revolution. Long live the Workman's International' "1 while in Danzig the dockers refused to unload munitions. Of all European peoples the Hungarians alone were friendly to the Poles, because under the hideous régime of Bela Kun they had tasted the fruits of the Bolshevik revolution2
1 The Poland of Pilsudski, Robert Machray, pp. 112-113.
2 On May 27, 1919, Lenin had written to the Hungarian Communists as follows : "Be firm. If there are waverings among the Socialists who came over to you yesterday, or among the petty bourgeoisie, in regard to the dictatorship of the proletariat, suppress the waverings mercilessly. Shooting is the proper fate or a coward in war*". (Collected Works, Lenin, vol. xvi, p. 229).
[ * On Lenin's own personal courage please see The Fatal Years by Colonel B.V. Nikitine who also quotes other authors. (WPT) ]
This dark political background to the Polish retreat of 375 miles convinced both Great Britain and France of the imminence of a Soviet victory — �Nothing could appear more certain than that the Soviet forces would capture Warsaw.�3 As early as July 12 this spirit of defeatism had already gripped the British Government. On that day, Lord Curzon, British Foreign Minister, who believed in the heresy that peace with Bolsheviks was possible, addressed a note to the Soviet Government. Five days later Chicherin suggested a conference, and, on August 10, Mr. Lloyd George in the House
of Commons advised Poland to accept the Bolshevik peace terms. These included among other things that the Polish army should be limited to 60,000 men supported by an armed militia of urban industrial workers �under the control of the labour organization of Russia, Poland, and Norway.�[4]
Comment : May the reader ponder for a moment, what was that "armed militia of urban industrial workers under the control of the labour organization" exactly to mean. (WPT)
3 The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World D�Abernon, p. 15.
[4] The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, William Henry Chamberlin (1935), vol. II, p. 208. See also The Soviets in World Affairs, Louis Fischer (1930), p. 267, and The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, pp. 70-71.
As they meant the complete Bolshevization they were rejected by Pilsudski who, as will be seen, four days before Mr. Lloyd George gave his fearful advice, when in the solitude of the Belvedere Palace an idea flashed into his mind which was to change the whole course of the war.
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik typhoon swept westward, and as something immediate had to be done by Great Britain and France, they decided to send a Mission to Warsaw. Lord D�Abernon, British Ambassador in Berlin, was instructed to proceed to Paris, where he was to be joined by General Weygand and others, and then hasten to Warsaw. When the Mission arrived there on July 25 it found that Pilsudski wanted shells, not advice.
On his arrival in Warsaw Pilsudski was satisfied that the position was strong, he left it as it was, avoided the diplomatists, now busy considering the Soviet peace terms, and placed General Haller in command of Warsaw, and raised a new Army, the Fifth, under General Sikorski.
The situation on the 200-mile battle front [described in detail].
In all, 178,500 Poles and Ukrainians faced 177,900 Bolsheviks.
As the bulk of both armies was in the neighbourhood of Warsaw, Weygand's advice to Pilsudski was to defend the line of the Vistula — while a deliberate counter-offensive was prepared behind that river. In this he was supported by many of the Polish generals. The idea was to smash the Soviet right and drive it south of the river Bug and cut it off from the Warsaw-Bialystok railway.
While Weygand and the Polish general talked, Pilsudski listened. he neither agreed nor disagreed, and seemingly their discussions left his mind blank. Then, on the night of August 5-6, he retired to his study in the Belvedere Palace, his account [L'Année 1920 extensively quoted].
When we look at the situation as it faced him it will be seen that his basic idea was to take advantage of the separation of his enemy's forces : "Tukhachevski's army was massed about Warsaw, and Yegorov's and Budienny's cavalry were in the vicinity of Lvov.
Could he carry out this counter-attack with extreme rapidity, and it must be remembered that he had little cavalry, then it was possibly to fall on the rear of the Soviet Eighteenth Army, which he knew was already in a state of dislocation because of the ever-growing confusion in Tukhachevski's supply system.3
3 For the state of Tukhachevski's army at this time, see Camon's La Manoeuvre Liberatrice (1929), p. 109.
Once Pilsudski had formulated his plan, it was severely criticized by his generals and his general staff. His boldness winded them, for they were hypnotized by Tukhachevski, and instead of urging their chief to strengthen his counter-attacking forces, they could think of nothing better than
to supplicate him to strengthen Warsaw.1 Pilsudski held firm to his idea, and on August 6 the order for the assembly was issued.2 He settled on August 17 as the day for his counter-attack, and on the 12th he left Warsaw for Deblin.
What was Tukhachevski�s plan ?
He was well aware that Lenin3 attached the highest importance to the fall of Warsaw, and now that he stood before its gates, what course should he take ? In reply he says that lack of troops prevented him from delivering a central attack or simultaneously attacking both his enemy�s flanks, and that he was forced to choose between either a right or a left flank attack. He decided to turn the Polish left and cut its communications with Danzig, and this in spite of the fact that he recognized that the outflanking army would have its back to East Prussia, which would place it at a disadvantage should the operation fail. He expected his left wing to be covered by Yegorov�s army.
On August 8 he issued his instructions for an attack on the 14th.
[Detailed instructions.] �Because of the high moral of our troops, we had the absolute right to count upon victory.�4 He said this although a copy of Pilsudski�s order of August 6 had fallen into his hands ; but fortunately for his enemy he believed it to be a bluff.
1 See Sikorski's La campagne Polono-Russe de 1920, pp. 70-77. Commenting on this, General Camon writes : "In the Polish G.H.Q., like the German in 1914, and also in other G.H.Qs. of the same period, the Operations Branch considered itself superior to the General-in-Chief — after all only an amateur — and G.H.Q. again and again returned to the idea of halting the Bolshevik advance by a counter-attack launched from the left flank of the front " (La Manoeuvre Liberatrice, p. 31), which was also General Weygand's idea.
2 See La Campagne Polono-Russe de 1920, Sikorski (1929), pp. 53-56, and La Manoeuvre Liberatrice, Camon, pp. 34-41.
3 In his Collected Works, vol. xvii, p. 308, we read : �All Germany boiled up when our troops approached Warsaw.�
4L�Année 1920, Annexe I, pp. 244-245.
When we examine these instructions, it will at once be seen
that they entail a general advance of the bulk of the Soviet forces directed north of Warsaw. The weakness of this attack did not lie in lack of numbers, but in lack of unity of command. Kamenev was in Moscow, Tukhachevski remained in Minsk, and Yegorov was in the neighbourhood of Lvov — over 200 miles distant from him. Worse still, he and Yegorov were at daggers drawn.
On august 10 Kamenev sent Yegorov an order to transfer Budienny and his cavalry to Tukhachevski�s command, but as his message could not be deciphered, there was a three-day delay before it was re-transmitted. Then, on the 13th, when it became understandable, Yegorov started to argue. He was not interested in the Warsaw operations, and was intent upon taking Lvov, etc., and once he had forced the Dniester, to carry the war into Rumania. The result was that Kamenev�s order was set aside and Budienny marched on Lvov as formerly had done the Tartar horde of Chmielnicki.
Meanwhile, what of Pilsudski ? He tells us that august 6 to 12 were days of great anxiety while he watched his enemy creep round his left flank. On the 11th Tukhachevski launched an attack on Pultusk, garrisoned, as Sikorski informs us, by worn-out troops who looked like �living corpses� in rags and with naked feet.1 [The Bolsheviks carried the Pultusk fortress ; on the 13th] Tukhachevski�s final orders for a general attack on the following day, sent out in clear by wireless, were intercepted, and the foreign diplomatists hastily retired from Warsaw to Lodz.
1 La Campagne Polono-Russe de 1920, Sikorski, p. 79.
Pilsudski, accompanied by five staff officers, established his G.H.Q. at Pulawy, a little to the south of Deblin, and on this day — August 13 — he visited the units of his Fourth Army, to be in no way encouraged by what he saw. The troops were so ill-equipped that, as he says, �Throughout the entire campaign I had as yet never seen such ragamuffins.�1 He visited unite after unit, spoke to the men, and did all he could to raise their confidence and morale.
On August 14, Radzymin was lost by the Poles ; this brought the Bolsheviks to within 15 miles of Warsaw. Simultaneously a fierce attack was launched against Sikorski on the Wkra and the situation became so critical that General Haller urged Pilsudski to start his counter-attack a day earlier than the date fixed. He agreed to do so, although another 24 hours would have been invaluable to him.
On August 15 the battle of the Wkra continued and a group of eight Polish armoured cars operated with signal effect in the area Raciaz-Drobin-Bielsk. Sikorski says : �With great skill they attacked outposts and destroyed supply columns and communications, etc..�2 The next day violent Bolshevik assaults were beaten back at Nasielsk ; but under cover of these attacks Tukhachevski�s Fourth Army wheeled round southward. The Polish situation grew worse and worse. That morning Pilsudski launched his counter-attack and during the next few days it was to advance to a depth of 150 miles.
1 L�Année 1920, p. 147.
2 La Campagne Polono-Russe de 1920, p. 181.
On August 16, 1920, the river Wieprz was crossed and the Polish Fourth Army was given as its objective the Warsaw-Brest-Litovsk road. Unlike Tukhachevski, who during his attack had remained at Minsk, Pilsudski passed the whole of this day in his motor-car and went from flank to flank to encourage his men and rapidly
to estimate the situation. What astonished him most was the total absence of enemy forces. On the left Garwolin was occupied and passed without oppositions ; therefore for the 17th Pilsudski decided to swing forward the right wing of the counter-attack �and search for traces of the phantom enemy and for any signs of a trap.� Again on the 17th he toured round his rapidly advancing front.
At the important railway station of Lukow, on the Brest-Litovsk line, he lunched with the headquarters staff of the 21st Division. Everyone affirmed �that there was no enemy in strength, and told him with enthusiasm that the whole of the civil population had risen in assistance, with the result that the few hostile groups met with were attacked by peasants armed with pitchforks accompanied by their wives carrying flails.�1
1 L�Année 1920, p. 152.
A few hours later, as he sat by his bed drinking a cup of tea, away to the north he heard the distant thunder of cannon.
The next morning the cannonade had ceased, and although the countryside swarmed with Red Cossacks, again he set out in his car and drove to Kolbiel in order to catch up with the rear of his 14th Division, which had taken the town during the night . When he arrived there he found that the entire Soviet Sixteenth Army was in rout,
so he ordered his drive to head for Warsaw, to co-ordinate the advance of the First and Fifth Armies with the counter-attack. This was unfortunate, for once his powerful presence was not felt on the battlefield, the pursuit slackened, with the result that much of August 18 was wasted. He writes : �There everyone seized upon the most minute manifestation of activity on the part of the enemy in order still to believe in the possibility of disaster instead of believing in victory.�1
[August 18 orders.]
When Pilsudski launched his counter-attack, Tukhachevski was still at Minsk, 300 miles from Warsaw, and twice the distance Moltke had been from Paris during the battle of the Marne. There he would seem to have lost all contact, not only with his enemy, but with his own armies; and he tells us that it was not until the 18th that he received a telephone call to inform him that an attack had been launched. He was then told that the attack by the �White Poles need not be taken seriously"2 Tukhachevski was too good a general to view the situation in this light.
1 Ibid., pp. 165-166. 2 Ibid., Annexe I, pp. 250-251.
Apparently unknown to him half his army was already in rout, while the remaining half was so trapped that his orders to them were inoperative.
By August 21 the rout of Tukhachevski's right wing was complete. First, the Soviet Sixteenth Army, then the Third, and lastly the Fifteenth had been struck in flank more by terror than by fighting. As they broke eastward in panic, the whole countryside became the scene of pandemonium ; units, fractions of units and innumerable stragglers, mixed pell-mell with thousands of supply carts ; while Pilsudski�s bare-footed and tattered men pressed the pursuit mile after mile without firing a shot.
Eventually, on August 25, the remnants of the Soviet Army of the West reached the line Grodno-east of Brest-Litovsk-Wlodawa, where the pursuit ended. The booty taken was immense : 66,000 prisoners besides 30,000 to 40,000 disarmed in Germany ; 231 guns, 1,023 machine-guns and 10,000 ammunition and supply wagons. During July and August the total Polish casualties numbered about 50,000 and the Soviet 150,000.
In spite of this great victory the campaign was not ended and two separate operations followed, one in the south and the other in the north. The first was carried out by Sikorski, who opened his offensive on September 12 and occupied Kovel, Lutzk, Rovno and Tarnapol on the 18th and Pinsk on the 20th. The second was led by Pilsudski who, after a masterful manœvre, attacked Tukhachevski on September 20, destroyed the Soviet Third Army in the Battle of the Niemen, and occupied Grodno on the 26th. This victory was at once followed by the battle of the Shara (Szczara),1 in which the remnants of the Soviet Armies were driven back to Minsk. In these two battles Pilsudski took, 50,000 prisoners and 160 guns. On October 10 an armistice was agreed, and on March 18, 1921, by the Treaty of Riga the eastern frontier of Poland was fixed as it stood until 1939.
1 For these two battles see articles by General Faury (French) in the Revue militaire française of February and March, 1922, and March, 1929. Faury was in 1920 attached to General Skierski, who commanded the Fourth Polish Army.
This marked the end of a remarkable campaign, fought between improvised armies of limited size in a vast theatre of war. It was a campaign of mobility and surprise, totally different from most of those fought during the World War. It was a contest between armies led mostly by young generals, and in which cavalry played an important part and field trenches no part at all, and above all, it was a war in which men were more important than matériel, and generals more important than their staffs.
The influence of this decisive battle on history was fully appreciated by Tukhachevski, who lost it, and by Lord D'Abernon, who watched it. Yet, strange to say, its importance was little
grasped by western Europe, and since has remained little noticed. Soon after his defeat Tukhachevski wrote :
. . . "There is not the slightest doubt that, had we been victorious on the Vistula, the revolution would have set light to the entire continent of Europe. . . . Like an overwhelming torrent it would have swept into Western Europe, etc."1
Later, in an article published in the Gazeta Polska of August 17, 1930, Lord D'Abernon set down his judgment as follows :
"The history of contemporary civilization knows no event of greater importance than the Battle of Warsaw, 1920, and none of which the significance is less appreciated. The danger menacing Europe at that moment was parried, and the whole episode forgotten. Had the battle been a Bolshevik victory, it would have been a turning point in European history, for there is no doubt at all that the whole of Central Europe would at that moment have been opened to the influence of Communist propaganda and a Soviet invasion, which it could with difficulty have resisted. . . . The events of 1920 also deserve attention for another reason : victory was attained, above all, thanks to the strategical genius of one man and thanks to the carrying through of a manœvre so dangerous as to necessitate not only genius, but heroism. . . . It should be the task of political writers to explain to European opinion that Poland saved Europe in 1920, and that it is necessary to keep Poland powerful and in harmonious relations with Western European civilization, for Poland is the barrier to the everlasting peril of an Asiatic invasion."2
1 L'Année 1920, p. 255.
2 Quoted from The Poland of Pilsudski, Machray, p. 118.
Further, by shielding Central Europe from the full blast of Marxist contagion, the battle of Warsaw set back the Bolshevik clock. It deprived Russia of the plunder she badly needed to stem her desperate economic crisis and dammed the outward flow of discontent and almost drowned the Bolshevik experiment.
In 1920, life in the U.S.S.R. had reached bedrock. The town dwellers starved ; typhus daily claimed thousands ; fodder for horses was unobtainable in the towns, wooden houses were pulled down for fuel, and in their thousands the workers abandoned the factories to seek food in the villages. In February, 1921, violent strikes broke out in the Petrograd factories, and again the Kronstadt sailors mutinied. The situation grew so critical that Lenin ceased to harbour the illusion . . . On March 8 he convoked the tenth congress of the Party and, in order to obtain bread, he revoked all Socialist decrees that affected agriculture . . . Further, he authorized private internal trading, but kept in his hands finance, heavy industry, much of light industry, transport and foreign trade. Thus, according to his new economic policy, everyone became reasonably free except the proletariat. . . .
On October 17, 1921, Lenin openly admitted his failure. To a congress of the political storm troops of the Party he said : �We supposed that it would be possible to change the old Russian economy into a State economy on a communist base. Unfortunately we made a great mistake in trying to do this. . . . Being so uncultured as we are, we cannot destroy capitalism by one attack. . . . In the civil war we were able to win because we established in the army the severest discipline. We have yet to establish the must brutal discipline in our working army in order
to secure our country, our republic. . . .�1 Necessity and not Marx turned Russia back to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.
On January 21, 1924, Lenin died at Gorky, near Moscow, and power passed to Stalin (Joseph Dzhugashvili, 1879-1953), who, because of his unbridled brutality, had been made secretary-general of the Party by Lenin. What remained of Marxism was grafted by him to the Russian Asiatic-Byzantine tradition, totalitarian State Capitalism was rapidly developed and everyone reduced to a proletarian level. The Political bureau became dictator, with the secret police as its instrument of rule, and the ever-growing bureaucracy emerged as the new middle class. Oswald Spengler wrote in 1931 : �What the Soviet r&eactue;gime has been attempting for the last fifteen years has been nothing but the restoration, under new names, of the political, military, and economic organization that it destroyed.�2 An observation proved correct to the letter, when the Russia of Stalin is compared with what the Marquis de Custine has to say of the Russia of Nicholas I in 1839.3
The state, instead of withering away, was established as an object of worship with Stalin as its omniscient prophet. Marxist terminology was retained as a liturgical language. �In this language,� writes Borin, �Totalitarian state capitalism would be called Communism. The dictatorship of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party would be named the dictatorship of the proletariat. The prosperity of the new governing class would be known as the prosperity of the working people. While preserving Marxist terminology the State Communistic bureaucracy pronounced the spirit of Marxism as reactionary, counter-revolutionary and Fascist. Marxism in Russia meant Political Bureau and State Police. Anybody who thought otherwise must die.�4
As Tukhachevski had foreseen, Marxism was found to be a theology too modern and too civilized for the Russians (etc). The U.S.S.R. reverted to the historic Russia of the �Third Rome,� and Tukhachevki�s defeat by Pilsudski at Warsaw was not the least of the factors which brought her back on to the old, traditional Tsarist path.
1 Quoted from Civilization at Bay, V. L. Borin (1951), p. 91.
2 Man and Technics (English edit., 1932), p. 99.
3 See Journey for our Time, trans. Phyllis Perm Kohler (English edit., 1953).
4 Civilization at Bay, p. 103.