. . . the country of the aristocrat-revolutionary par excellence is Poland. This chapter is the study of one such, with whose person the history of the resurrected Poland of the last sixteen years is inextricably bound up. There are no many points of analogy between Fascist Italy and the new Poland : but there is this much in common between the
position of Mussolini and that of Pilsudski, that each has come to represent an element of stability in his country�s international relations, an in a country like Poland [1930�s], where elements of stability are not the most conspicuous items of the political balance-sheet, such an asset has a value which may be fully appreciated only when it is lost. It is true, the association of stability with such dynamic personages as Mussolini or Pilsudski is not without that element of paradox of which History is apt to be prodigal in dealing with her favourites. It is the traditional case of the converted sinner making the best saint. Instability has been (one would say) the Leitmotiv of the career of the present dictator of Poland. Before he attained his present position he had been in succession an exile in Siberia, a conspirator in partibus, a general in the Austro-Hungarian Army and a prisoner in a German fortress. He is the founder, and malgr&é tout the hero, of the Polish Socialist Party [*] ; and he is by birth a country gentleman !
[*] Pilsudski�s �socialism�, originally quite genuine, was never any other than a means towards Poland�s independence. He had gradually distanced himself from anything �socialist�, beginning ca. 1905. — (WPT)
He is said once to have told a foreign diplomat in Warsaw that there were only two decent families in Poland, the Czartoryscy and his own. But that is a story which might be told of any Pole. Pilsudski came, in fact, of an old Samogitian family of szlachta (country gentry), settled in Lithuania. In
1867, when Pilsudski was born, they were living on an estate called Zulów, which had been inherited by his mother, in an old Polish wooden house full of old furniture and shadows and political legends. It was the very setting for the youth of a Polish patriot ; and the turn for conspiracy, which is innate in every Polish schoolboy, had ample and delightful scope. The memories ad the wounds of the rising of 1863 were fresh and bleeding. Pilsudski�s father, under the insurrection government—or rather, one of the insurrection governments, for the insurgents unfortunately could not agree on a single one—had held the post of � Civil Commissioner for Samogitia �. When the rising failed, he lost his own family estate.
A neighbouring estate, also confiscated after the insurrection, had belonged to a family of Irish immigrants—quorum pietatis causa liceat meminisse——and one of these lived for months on end in semi-concealment under an assumed name in the house of the Pilsudscy. The proscribed insurgents were beginning to return to Poland, sometimes with and sometimes without the connivance of the Russian Government ; and visitors came and went at Zulów in circumstances of delicious mystery. There may have been nights when young Józef woke, like Harry Esmond, to find some Father Holt whispering from the window-sill, � Silentium ! �tis I, my boy !�
The father of Pilsudski was described by one of his
sons as � a many-sided encyclopædic mind, but unfitted for practical work�. He had wished to become a professor, but had been obliged to take over the family estates, as there was no one else to manage them. He wrote occasional articles on agriculture in technical journals, and he built a turpentine factory and a brick-kiln at Zulów, but they did not pay. The mainstay of the household was Pilsudski�s mother. She died at forty, having by then borne a family of six sons and four daughters.
In the summer of 1874, in the space of two hours, a fire destroyed the house and farm at Zulów and two kilometers of forest ; and the Pilsudscy . . . found themselves very greatly reduced in circumstances. They moved from the country to Vilna, the nearest town ; and the boys were sent to the Russian secondary school.
Here Józef Pilsudski came for the first time face to face with the hated Muscovite. Contact with the ruling race did not modify the youthful patriot�s views. He is said to have been threatened with expulsion for � writing in Polish on the walls of the school�. What the writing was, is not recorded !
The Russian influence was very strong in the early eighteen-eighties in young Poland. The contemporaries of the Pilsudscy used to come down from
the universities in vacation, with secretly printed copies of the works of Hertzen, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. They affected the � struggle against prejudices�, and � theed� and � thoued� and � Little-brothered� one another after the Russian manner, instead of speaking, as the Poles do, in the third person. Pilsudski and his friends set their face against this tendency, and took heir Socialism with a strong dash of Polish nationalism.
Józef was completing his studies at the secondary school when his mother died. Soon afterwards he was sent to the University of Kharkov to study medicine. He was expelled, before his first year was completed, for taking part in student disturbances. There were several others of the expelled ones in Vilna ; and, as usual, they formed a secret society for debate and conspiracy and � educational work�.
In the winter of 1887 a delegated of the Russian terrorists visited Vilna, and endeavoured to induce the young Poles of the Pilsudski set to join in a projected attempt on the life of the Tsar. Józef Pilsudski was opposed to this suggestion. One of the group however, though he did not tell his companions, was convinced by the Russian�s arguments, and prlmised—he was a chemist by profession—to help the terrorists to procure explosives. When his activities later were discovered by the police, Józef
Pilsudski was involved. He was arrested and sentenced to five years� exile in Siberia.
( . . )
In 1892 he returned from exile with the martyr�s halo, and was warmly welcomed by his relations. One of his brothers-in-law, a doctor with a large
practice in Vilna, was ready to find him well-paid work ; and his sisters and aunts had carefully matured a rich marriage for the martyr�s approval. But he proved refractory. The lure of politics was still too strong.
Vilna was in those days a great rallying-ground for political outcasts. They formed a social circle, where they could talk politics. But they did not do much else beside talk. After his exile Pilsudski found them dull. He turned to Warsaw, and visited the Warsaw politicians of that date, including Roman Dmowski, who was to be his bitterest enemy in the struggle for Polish independence. But he � found something lacking in them all, something of which they found I had too much�. He fell back on Socialism, and founded the P.P.S. (Polish Socialist Party).
In the �nineties of the lest century a Polish Socialist party could not of course show its head above ground. The P.P.S. accordingly confined itself to � educational work�, by which was meant in this case the production of a clandestine newspaper. The newspaper, which was called Robotnik (The Worker), was produced by Pilsudski and Alexander Sulkiewicz : but Pilsudski was the heart and soul of it. He was at once editor, publisher, manager, printer, and news-agent. It was produced on a hand-press, which he kept hidden in a cupboard in his room in Vilna, and later in Łódz. He used to
make long journeys as far as Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, and Odessa, distributing copies. He had very little money and used to sleep in carts and public parks and on the benches of churches which opened early. In 1896 he married his present wife, the widow of an engineer ; and she helped him with the work of the paper.
I have in my possession an early number of Robotnik (of the year 1894). It is well printed and does not seem to betray the amateur compositor. It contains articles by the German Socialist leaders Bebel and Bernstein, some verse, paragraphs on recent arrests, a review of current events in Austria and France, and a long article (which from the style looks as if it might have been written by Pilsudski) on the recent death of the Tsar Alexander and the accession of Nicholas II. In short, it resembles very closely any other clandestine newspaper appearing in Russia at this time.
The next episode reads as if it came straight from the film. One morning the police, making one of their periodical surprise visits to Pilsudski�s flat, discovered the hand-press in the cupboard. He was arrested and imprisoned in � Pavilion X� of the Citadel at Warsaw. Here he feigned madness, rejecting food, cutting extraordinary antics, and so forth. The doctors watched him carefully, but were not convinced. After some weeks he gave it up, and began to take food again. This, as luck
—Pilsudski�s luck—would have it, convinced the doctors : for such lucid intervals are common in this kind of malady !
Instead of transferring him to the local asylum, however, the Warsaw authorities sent him to the Military Hospital of St. Nicholas in Petrograd. Alexander Sulkiewicz traveled to Petrograd by the same train, and there arranged that a young doctor belonging to the Petrograd branch of the party should be given a post at St. Nicholas.
Preparations were then made for the escape. One morning—it was the morning of 13 May 1901—the young doctor sent for Pilsudski for private examination in his room. The examination lasted an inordinately long time, and no response came when the hospital attendants knocked at the door. The door was broken open, and doctor and patient were found to have decamped.
They made their way to Reval, Riga, and from there southwards to Kiev. From here Pilsudski went to a Polish estate in Podolia, where he met his wife. Together they made their way into Austria, crossing the Russian frontier at a point in the vast forests owned by the Zamoyski family.
After a short visit to London and Paris, Pilsudski settled down in Cracow in 1902. He was warned
bys the Galician authorities that, if he interfered in the slightest degree in Galician politics, he would be expelled from Austria. But the tortuous internal politics of the Austrian Poles did not interest him. His mind was still concentrated on the � main issue�, which he saw always as a common uprising of Austrian and Russian Poland, the signal to be given by a European war. The conservative Galician Poles, whose horizon was bounded by the Austrian Reichrath, laughed at such visionary ideas. But he found friends among the weak but growing Socialist Party of Galicia, notably Ignaz Daszynski, now Marshal of the Diet, whom he first met at this time ; and for the rest, like Louis Napoleon in his English exile, he believed in his star.
When the First Russian Revolution of 1905 was on the point of breaking out in Russia, Pilsudski argued hotly for a � general rising� ; but he was opposed by every element outside, and by some elements inside, the party. The Poles accordingly made no distinctive national movement in 1905; the Tsarist Government got the better of the Revolution, and Pilsudski resumed his life in Galicia, conscious of failure and convinced of the impotence of improvised Revolution.
From this time on . . . he devoted himself to what he called orgnizacya bojowa, organization for war. His idea was to found rifle-shooting clubs, in which young
Poles would learn the elements of military training and the use of the rifle. When the war came, the clubs were to form the cadres of Polish legions, which he then meant to create as the nucleus of an army for the future Polish State. Of the vast amount of material and organization that is required to make an army, he knew nothing.
Rifle-clubs had long been an institution in Austria, and there was little difficulty in obtaining government sanction for their institution. The �difficulties came . . . from within. The P.P.S. was more than suspicious of the nationalism of the clubs, and eventually endeavoured to suppress them. The bourgeois elements were continually breaking off and staring new organizations of their own, while the extremists of the Left were anxious to divert the young men to the work of political assassination in Russia. Pilsudski steadily endeavoured to hold the balance between the bourgeois and Socialist elements ; and the tact and impartiality which he developed in the process gradually won for him a position which left him, when the crisis of war came, the almost universally acknowledged leader of the movement.
But few persons in Galicia at this time shared his belief in the coming war, and recruits were not plentiful. The Bosnian crisis and the partial mobilization of Austria-Hungary in 1912 swelled the numbers. On 1912 there were some 600 to 800
members of the rifle-clubs, of all parties. But they fell off again ; and, when the war came at last, it took the leaders completely by surprise.
All though these years of waiting, Pilsudski�s house in Cracow, 16 Ulica Topolowa, was a center for Polish revolutionaries and exiles of all shades, while Finns, Caucasians, and even Russians, of the same way of thinking, would frequently turn up to see how the Organizacya Bojowa worked. It was rare that a night passed without beds being improvised on sofas, tables, or the floor ; and with the daylight began again the babel of young voices discussing politics. Conspiracy of this sort is meat and drink to a large class of Polish intelligentsia. But with Pilsudski it was only a means to an end.
He was in Paris early in 1914, and the following extract from an address which he delivered in the hall of the French Geographical Society in February of that year will serve to give the note on which he always harped. After saying that there was a Cretan question, and a Macedonian question, and an Irish question, but no Polish question, he continued :
� The world has given up considering us in international calculations and combinations. The military movement brings the Polish Question back on the European chess-board. . . . Since 1904 we have witnessed a whole galaxy of conflict and upheaval, in which the decisive rôle has been
played by armed force. The sword alone weighs to-day in the balance of the destiny of nations. A people which should shut its eyes to this evidence would compromise its future irretrievably. We must not be such a people.�
At about the same time the leader of the pro-Russian National Democrats, Roman Dmowski, was writing :
� The period of insurrections, the period of armed struggles for independence, is henceforward closed. (Etc.)�
The last annual camp of the Strzelcy (riflemen) was in June 1914. When it was over, instructors and volunteers dispersed. The treasury of the movement was nearly empty. Suddenly the clouds began to gather in the international sky, and subscriptions and recruits poured in. The Socialist and bourgeois elements in the movement sank their differences, and for a time—a very short time—even the National
Democrats were cowed and fell into line. Pilsudski went to Vienna, to find out what would be the attitude of the Austrian Government toward the proposal to create legions.
He returned from Vienna at three o�clock in the afternoon of 5 August. (The Austrian declaration of war on Russia was dated the following day.) The Strzelcy (Socialist riflemen) and Druzyny (bourgeois riflemen), who had collected in Cracow, were drawn up to meet him. Pilsudski, wearing a strzelecki cap and carrying a whip, inspected and then addressed them. He said :
� From this time on there are neither Strzelcy nor Druzyny ! All of you here are Polish soldiers ! Particular emblems henceforth disappear. Your only emblem is the white eagle. Until, however, new emblems can be issued, it is my order that you should exchange one with the other the white plaque of the Druzyny for the eaglet of the
Druzyny for the eaglet of the Strzelcy, and vice versa, as a sign of the brotherly unity which must rule amongst Polish troops. You will shortly, it may be, proceed to the field of battle, where I trust that the last traces of differences between you will disappear.�
As he spoke, Pilsudski handed the emblem on his own cap to the chief of the Druzyny, and pinned the emblem from the latter�s cap on his own. All present followed sit, embracing one another with tears in their eyes. The roll was then called, and
about one hundred of those present were told off, amid intense excitement, for active service.
The romance of those hot still nights in Cracow in the first week of August 1914 will not readily be forgotten by any who lived through them. It was the lull before the storm. The Austrian and Russian mobilizations were still proceeding, and the armies had not yet been launched. The boy volunteers paraded the streets of the ancient Polish town, singing � Jeszcze Polska (Poland is not yet lost)� and the rest.1
1 The Legions produced a great number of songs, which have been collected and published but not, unfortunately, translated into any other language (so far as I am aware). Some of them are of great beauty,
\
. . . Pilsudski�s � Invasion � of Russia is on a par with Garibaldi�s descent on Sicily with the Thousand Braves. The significance of such actions is not to be sought in their success.
Three years before the war, an English historian1 wrote :
� Garibaldi is not to be judged as a professional soldier leading modern armies, but as the greatest master of that special department of human activity known as revolutionary war. . . . Owing to the size and efficiency of modern conscript armies, there cannot be another revolutionary war precisely of the Garibaldian type in the Europe of the coming era. . . . But Garibaldi�s claim on the memory rests on more than his actual achievements. It rests on that which was one part of his professional equipment as a soldier of revolution,
but which surpasses and transcends it—his appeal to the imagination.�
1 Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, London, 1911.
It is from this standpoint that the secret of Pilsudski�s significance is to be sought. (Etc.)