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By Root 998 0

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.12

The United States lay somewhere in between. It too had memories of Poles: Tadeusz Kościuszko, a hero in the American War of Independence; the Poles on both sides in the Civil War; Paderewski packing the concert halls. By 1914, Poles were the largest single group of immigrants from Central Europe, perhaps 4 million of them, with their own newspapers, schools, churches and votes. The war awoke their latent patriotism but it also created divisions between pro-Allied and pro-German Poles, giving the impression that Poles were always quarreling with each other. But Americans were moved by the sufferings of Poland, just as they were by those of Belgium. Wilson gradually came around to supporting an independent Poland but he was noncommittal on its borders. “I saw M. Dmowski and M. Paderewski in Washington,” he told his fellow peacemakers in Paris, “and I asked them to define Poland for me, as they understood it, and they presented me with a map in which they claimed a large part of the earth.”13

When the French tried to get Dmowski’s Polish National Committee recognized as the only representative of the Polish people, the British and Americans held back. They urged Dmowksi to build a coalition with PiƗsudski. The world’s most famous Pole, Ignace Paderewski, undertook to bring the two men together. In December 1918, the British arranged for him to travel back to Poland on HMS Condor. (He played the old ward-room piano for the officers on Christmas Eve.) His arrival in Posen (Poznan) on Christmas Day, 1918, produced immense excitement. Street demonstrations turned violent, and by the time he left for Warsaw on New Year’s Day, Posen had risen against its German rulers. In the hand of a huge bronze statue of the great German chancellor Bismarck, a wit placed a fourth-class ticket to Berlin.14

Paderewski came from a modest family in Austrian Galicia, where his father worked for a great aristocratic landowner. “A remarkable man, a very remarkable man,” the prince later reminisced to Nicolson. “Do you realise that he was born in one of my own villages? Actually at Chepetowka? And yet, when I speak to him, I have absolutely the impression of conversing with an equal.”15 Paderewski became an international star. Burne-Jones sketched him, George Bernard Shaw praised his musical intelligence, and women sent him love letters by the hundreds.

Voluble, untidy, he was a man of great learning with the open enthusiasm of a child. During the war he had vowed not to perform until Poland was free again. He devoted himself to raising money for Polish relief and lobbying the world’s leaders. In the summer of 1916 he played, Chopin of course, at a private party at the White House. “I wish you could have heard Paderewski’s speeches for his country,” Wilson told a colleague later, “he touched chords more sublime than when he moved thousands as he commanded harmony