Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [135]
On his return to Warsaw in 1918, PiƗsudski, who with his Legions possessed one of the few coherent forces left in central Europe, seized power from the German occupation authorities in the name of Poland. “It is impossible,” said a Polish politician, “to express all the excitement and fever of enthusiasm which gripped Polish society at this moment. After one hundred and twenty years the cordons broke. ‘They’ are gone! Freedom! Independence! Our own statehood!” One noble family brought out wine from 1772, the date of the first partition, which they had kept to toast this moment. (“Strange to say it was drinkable,” reported an English diplomat.5)
PiƗsudski 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 PiƗsudski 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.”6
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, PiƗsudski 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.
PiƗsudski 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. PiƗsudski had to weld together different economies, different laws and different bureaucracies. He had to rationalize nine separate legislative systems.