PARIS 1919 (35 page)

Pi
sudski had many opponents: conservatives afraid of his socialism, liberals who disliked his enthusiasm for violence, and those who looked to the Allies, even Russia, for help. Their spokesman was his great rival, Roman Dmowksi. Where Pi
sudski came from the gentry, Dmowski was a poor boy from the city. A biologist, he loved science, reason and logic. Music, he told the great Polish pianist Paderewski, was “mere noise.” He despised grandiose schemes, noble posturing and futile gestures, all of which he felt Polish nationalism had seen far too much of. He wanted Poles to become modern and businesslike. He had little nostalgia for the old Poland, for its tradition of religious tolerance or its attempts to compromise with other nationalities such as Lithuanians or Ukrainians or Jews. Like the Social Darwinists he admired, he held that life was struggle. The strong won and the weak lost. He was generally admired in western Europe, although the British had reservations. “He was a clever man,” said a diplomat who had to deal with him, “and clever men are distrusted: he was logical in his political theories, and we hate logic: and he was persistent with a tenacity which was calculated to drive everybody mad.”
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Dmowski's Polish National Committee in Paris claimed to speak for the Poles, and in 1918 the French government agreed that an army of Polish exiles in France commanded by General Józef Haller should come under its control. When the war ended, Poland had two potential governments, one in Paris and one in Warsaw, and two rival leaders, each with his own armed forces. In contrast, the Czechs were already speaking with a single, clear voice.

Outsiders wondered whether Poland would make it. In 1919, all its borders were in question and there were enemies everywhere: the surviving units of the German army, many of them to the east, and Russians (Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik, none wanted an independent Poland) and other nationalists competing for the same territory: Lithuanians in the north, Ukrainians to the east, and Czechs and Slovaks to the south. And Poland had few natural defenses. Between 1918 and 1920, Pi
sudski was to fight six different wars. He also had to watch his back, with supporters of Dmowksi to his right and radicals to the left.

Pi
sudski grew thinner and paler and more intense. He worked frantically, often through the night, keeping himself awake with endless tea and cigarettes. In those early months he often walked across from the palace he had commandeered to eat a simple meal alone in a cheap restaurant. His task was appalling. As much as 10 percent of Poland's wealth had been destroyed in the war. The Germans had ransacked the Polish territories during their occupation. Raw materials, manufactured goods, factories, machinery, even church bells had been fed into the German war effort. “I have nowhere seen anything like the evidences of extreme poverty and wretchedness that meet one's eye at almost every turn,” wrote a British diplomat who arrived in Warsaw at the beginning of 1919. Pi
sudski had to weld together different economies, different laws and different bureaucracies. He had to rationalize nine separate legislative systems. He had to reduce five different currencies to one, and he did not have even the means to print banknotes. Railways were a nightmare, with 66 kinds of rails, 165 types of locomotives and a patchwork of signaling systems.
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He was dealing too with a people whose ambitions, after a century of frustration, now far outstripped their strength. “The Poles are developing an appetite like a freshly hatched sparrow,” reported a German emissary less than a month after the armistice. There was talk of the frontiers of 1772, when Poland included most of today's Lithuania and Belarus and much of Ukraine. In Paris, Dmowksi and his Polish National Committee promoted a huge Poland to act as a check on both Germany and Bolshevism. Their Poland would have significant minorities of Germans, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians—40 percent of the total population—all ruled firmly by the Poles. While Dmowski talked the language of self-determination to the Allies, there was to be no such nonsense at home.
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Pi
sudski was more cautious. He, too, wanted a strong Poland but he was prepared to accept less than Dmowski. He was also willing to contemplate a federation, in which the Lithuanians, perhaps, or the Ukrainians, would work with Poles as equals. He recognized that he needed some help from the Allies. “All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente, on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany.” In the east, the situation was different. “Here there are doors which open and close and it depends on who will force them open and how far.”
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On one thing, though, all Poles agreed: the need for access to the Baltic. They were putting up with great hardships, reported an American officer from Warsaw, because they could foresee Poland being a great power again, with its trade flowing along the Vistula and the railways which ran to the sea. It was essential not to take that hope away: “Their confidence in the future rudely shaken, the acuteness of the present becomes more sharply defined and their patriotism is shaken to the foundation. Without this future why should they continue to resist Bolshevism?” Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, was the obvious choice for a port. It had once been a great free city under Polish rule. The Amsterdam of the East, people had called it, with its prosperous trade, its rich merchants and its elegant buildings. Since the 1790s, however, it had been under German rule. In 1919 its population was over 90 percent German, although much of the surrounding countryside was heavily Polish.
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The Allies agreed before the Peace Conference that Poland should be independent. The British, however, were not prepared to invest much to achieve this, since they had little national interest at stake. They also feared, with some reason, that Poland could become a liability. Who would defend it if its neighbors, Germany and Russia in particular, attacked? Moreover, the British did not particularly care for either Polish faction. Pi
sudski had fought against them and was a dangerous radical. Dmowski and the Polish National Committee were too right-wing. “In fact the prevailing opinion,” said a British diplomat in Warsaw, “which to a great extent influenced me at the time seemed to be that to do anything the Polish Committee asked for would be to fasten upon Poland a regime of wicked landlords who spent most of their time in riotous living, and establish there a Chauvinist Government whose object was to acquire territories inhabited by non-Polish populations.” Dmowski did not help himself when he was in Britain during the war by making remarks, as he did, for example, at a dinner given by G. K. Chesterton, that “my religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews.” The British, who had their share of anti-Semitism, found him crude. Distinguished British Jews protested to the government about its dealings with the Polish National Committee. In the Foreign Office, Lewis Namier, himself of Polish and Jewish origin, waged a campaign against Dmowski and “his chauvinist gang.”
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The French, by contrast, were not only great supporters of Dmowski; they took a profound interest in Poland. In the autumn of 1917 Pichon publicly promised France's support for an independent Poland, “a big and strong, very strong” Poland, several months before either Britain or the United States. French policy toward Poland was a mixture of the practical and the romantic. France no longer had Russia to counterbalance Germany, but a strong Poland, allied perhaps to Czechoslovakia and Rumania, could fill that role. Poland for the French was also memories of Maria Walewska, the beautiful mistress of Napoleon (their son had become foreign minister of France), of sad Polish exiles in Paris, of Frédéric Chopin, the lover of their own George Sand, of the Polish volunteers fighting for France against Prussia in 1870. Poland was a cause both for devout Catholics and good liberals. As a schoolboy, Clemenceau had chatted with Poles escaping tsarist repression. “Poland will live again,” he wrote in his newspaper on the outbreak of the Great War. “One of the greatest crimes of history is going to be undone.” During the war, the French gave money to Polish relief; during the Peace Conference, they ate dinners in Poland's honor.
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