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By Root 1088 0

Ɨsudski was moving troops into German territory around Posen, north into Lithuania and south to Galicia. The difficulty was how to stop him. The Allies could withhold supplies, but they had not yet sent much anyway. They could threaten, but they had very little real power in the center of Europe. Indeed, they had been obliged to keep German troops in place along the frontier with Russia. They also hesitated to come down too hard on the Poles. As Wilson said in May when the Council of Four was considering, yet again, ways of getting the Polish army to stop attacking the Ukrainians, “If Paderewski falls and we cut off food supplies to Poland, won’t Poland herself become Bolshevik? Paderewski’s government is like a dike against disorder, and perhaps the only one possible.” If the dike went, who could tell how far west the Bolshevik current might flow?

The peacemakers sent plaintive telegrams and fact-finding missions. “Action undertaken without further knowledge,” said Lloyd George sagely, “might lead to a mess.” They sent military experts, the French with a young Colonel Charles de Gaulle in their number, the British led by the war hero General Adrian Carton de Wiart. With only one arm, one eye and one foot, he impressed the Poles deeply with his complete disregard of danger and his willingness to fight duels.20

Otherwise the peacemakers left Polish matters largely to the experts. In February, the Supreme Council established a Commission on Polish Affairs, to receive the reports coming in from Poland. Two weeks later, Balfour, who was hoping to speed up the work of the Peace Conference in the absence of Wilson and Lloyd George, discovered that nothing was being done about Poland’s borders. On his suggestion, the Polish commission took on the job. Its members, in the absence of any detailed instructions, assumed that they should base their decisions on ethnic factors and on Wilson’s promise of access to the sea.21 This was nearly impossible.

Poland’s lack of natural barriers had let invaders in over the centuries; it had also let Poles flow out. In the east, Polish settlers had pushed north and south of the great forests and marshes lying across the border of what is today Belarus and Ukraine. The result was like a crescent moon, with a heavily Polish area around Vilna on its northern end, another around Lvov (German: Lemberg; Polish: Lwów; today, Lviv in the Ukraine) in the south. In the north, Poles mingled with Lithuanians and Germans. In the middle, said one of the experts in Paris, was a huge region “with its enigmatic population, which may be White Russian or Ukrainian, but is certainly not Polish.”22 The towns were Polish or Jewish (many Jews identified with the Poles) and in the country there was a thin sprinkling of Polish landowners.

In the west there was a similar ethnic jumble. For centuries, the Poles had been pushing north to the Baltic, and the Germans had been moving eastward. Along the eastern shores of the Baltic the cities were largely German. In the countryside the big landowners were usually German— the Baltic Barons, as they were known—although toward the south some were Polish and Lithuanian. A Polish majority lay along the banks of the Vistula. East Prussia, tucked in the southeast corner of the Baltic, was largely German-speaking and Protestant. If Poland got access to the sea, should it have control of both the banks of the Vistula and of Danzig itself ? That would leave hundreds of thousands of Germans living under Polish rule and perhaps cut off the land route from the western part of Germany to East Prussia.

Statistics were as unreliable as they were elsewhere in the center of Europe. In any case, even the inhabitants of that part of the world were not always sure who they were. Was identity religious or linguistic? Did Polish-speaking Protestants, a significant group in the southern part of East Prussia, identify with their coreligionists, who were German, or with the Poles, who were Catholic? Were Lithuanians a separate nationality or a variety of Pole? Were Ukrainians really Russian?

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