POLAND: National Glue

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At the Monastery of the Mountain of Light in Czestochowa, early last week, the arm of the priest who stands to the left of the doorway, dips his little broom in a can of holy water, and dexterously swishes precious spray over the pilgrims, bestowing virtue on the devout but not wasting a drop, grew tired. Thousands of grim, black-clad peasants who had been living on potatoes and pickles, hundreds of gayly costumed villagers, a few colonels in uniform, and counts in Bond Street tweeds, were flocking to Poland’s holiest shrine to pray to Regina Regni Poloniae, the “Black Madonna” with the sabre cuts in her cheek. Their monotonously repeated prayer: “Theotokos, Mother of God, thanks to thee the wheat is in. But let it not be wasted; let there be no war.”

The devout in Warsaw went to mass. A few hours later they flocked to an international soccer match, were well pleased to see the Poles whip the Hungarians, 4-to-2. In bright red trolleys still carrying advertisements of German products, they rode to see Shirley Temple in The Little Princess. They bought lottery tickets in the tobacco shops. The best people still went to lunch at 2:30 and dragged it out until 6, sipped Kimmel at the streamlined Cafe Adria, laughed heartily over Geneva, a play by brash old Bernard Shaw about three dictators named Herr Battler, Signer Bombardone and General Flanco.

Even at the grim work of preparation, the Poles maintained an outward calm. To the Army, of which every Pole was proud, would fall the job of defending frontiers and stopping battalions. To the people fell the job of protecting themselves against bombs, gas, dissension, terrorism, discouragement. They did it magnificently:

>Men, women, children of all walks of life took spades in hand and dug 13 miles of zigzag trenches in parks, playgrounds, lawns, vacant lots. The rich rode in limousines to shady Lazienki Park, were bowed out by chauffeurs, pitched in until soft hands were raw. Men went straight from shops and offices to dig by night. Musicians’ guilds and actors’ associations were given schedules for digging. Alexandra Pilsudska, widow of Poland’s great Josef Pilsudski, broke ground. The Mayor of Warsaw dug, and so did Premier Slawoj Skladkowski, right in his own front yard (he directed workers to dig in the lawn, avoiding the flower beds).

>Some 300,000 women and children were sent to the interior from Warsaw. But many women stayed in harness, 20,000 joined an organization called W. P. K. Its founder, Maria Wittek, fought in the World War in the Polish Legion and against the Bolsheviks under Marshal Pilsudski. He later gave her special permission to study in the military officers’ college. She holds a rank in the regular army, is Inspectorette of the W. P. K. Her followers, in pleated blue skirts, khaki shirts, blue Sam Browne belts and berets, were last week taking over jobs as guards, drivers, messengers, signalers, nurses.

>One of every ten people in Poland (total population: 35,000,000) is Jewish. The reactionary, white-collar Endeks (National Democratic Party) have tried to persuade the Government to adopt Nazi tactics of persecution. The Jews, who live for the most part in ghettos and who persistently wear the black coats, beards, yamilkes (skullcaps) and haircuts the Tsars forced on them many years ago, have not had a happy time in Poland. Nevertheless, Poland’s Zionists last week declared that 3,500,000 Jews “wait in full preparedness” to do their part in defending the country.

>Another sore minority in Poland are the 4,500,000 Ukrainians in the South East. As recently as last April young Polish roughs were beating Ukrainian ringleaders with sticks and iron bars, wrecking their shops and buildings, on the grounds that, plotting revolt, they had hid munitions in churches, machine guns in homes. At that time Ukrainian politicians were said to be itching to throw off Polish shackles even if it meant taking on German ones. But last week Undo (Ukrainian National Democratic Union) declared that Ukrainians would fight beside, not against, Poles.

>No minority, but the sorest lot of all, are Poland’s peasants. There are 20,000,000 of them, 5,000.000 of whom are continually unemployed. Few can read, some in Galicia do not know that the Emperor Franz Joseph is dead and that they are no longer Austrian subjects. To them salt is like gold dust, bread like caviar. But last week peasant boys were stolidly shuffling to mobilization centres, farmers were sending their only horses to bolster the country’s cavalry-minded army.

The bitterest grudges, the most grinding poverty, the strongest loves were forgotten last week. Poles are phlegmatic. Poland’s suicide rate, the lowest in Europe, is nine per 100,000 compared with 13 in Britain, 29 in Germany. As last week wore on, as the nerves of the rest of the world unraveled like rope-ends, only one complaint was to be heard in Poland: What are they waiting for? Isn’t it clear that compromise is out of the question? Why do they not begin? Soon enough of the questions were answered:

M-Day. Early one afternoon a large crowd of common workmen walked briskly through the streets of Warsaw, stopping beside clear spaces on walls every few paces, slopping paste on the walls, spreading out four posters which spelled one word: WAR. One ordered general mobilization (all able-bodied men between 21 and 40), another the prompt delivery of all motor vehicles, bicycles and horses to the State, a third prohibited the sale of alcoholic drinks. The fourth, picturing marching men, guns, tanks, planes and the handsome profile of Poland’s Commander-in-Chief Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, declared: “Force must be met with force.”

A few said, “As we expected”; a few shouted, “Long live Smigly-Rydz!” but most just read and walked on. Since most reserves had already been called up, the decree was only a signal: the button had been pressed.

At 5 p. m., at the gates of the Foreign Office just off Marshal Pilsudski Square, a tall man dressed in black stooped to read one of the posters pasted low on the wall. Passersby began to notice him. By the time he straightened up a crowd was around him. “Beck! Beck!” they cried, cheering and clapping. Colonel Josef Beck, Foreign Minister of Poland, smiled, touched his hat, and disappeared into the Foreign Office.

For two reasons, that smile must have tasted bitter on Josef Beck’s lips. The coming of war meant the final breakdown of his hard-boiled system of checks and balances, playing off the totalitarians against the democracies for the peace of Poland. The coming of war also meant that Colonel Beck’s brave stand against Adolf Hitler after the dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia had failed; that matching the Fuhrer at his own game, bluff for bluff, had only pushed him beyond bluff to blows.

Leaders. Poland is the amoeba of Europe. Since the Tenth Century the rhythm of its life has been grow, divide, grow, divide. The very first king to give Poland substantial nationhood (Boleslav, the Wry-mouthed, 1086-1139) split his inheritance between four sons. And the most recent man to contribute to Polish statehood, Marshal Pilsudski, similarly divided his power (though not his land) among three favorites.

One was Colonel Beck. The second was Ignacy Moscicki, who became President. Upon the shoulders of the third fell the job Josef Pilsudski loved best.

Within an hour of the Leader’s death on May 12, 1935, 49-year-old Edward Smigly-Rydz* became Inspector-General (or Generalissimo) of the Army, Fourteen months later he had the Premier send out a circular to all Government ministries proclaiming him “Second Citizen” of the Republic, next in rank in every way to the President, who by the Constitution was Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Last week the President signed his own superiority away. Marshal Smigly-Rydz was made Commander-in-Chief, was designated successor to the Presidency in case of vacancy before the war ends. President Moscicki’s term expires next year.

Somewhere between May 1935, when he was an obscure army man, and this week, when he was dictator of Poland, Edward Smigly-Rydz picked up the designation Strong Man. Although it fits him as ill as the style Athlete would fit Adolf Hitler, it stuck. Perhaps his profile (with an army hat on, for he has little forehead and no hair) accounts for it, perhaps pressagentry. Whatever the reason, he is the gentlest Strong Man ever to make thrones totter. An orphan at nine, he grew up to love painting, history, philosophy, went to Cracow to study them. On the side he acted beautifully in amateur theatricals. He distinguished himself as an athlete, but was no bonecrusher; fenced gracefully, played keen tennis, rode like an Arab, and was the only one at the University who could swim Jagellonia Lake. It was in Cracow that he first met Josef Pilsudski, who was organizing rifle clubs throughout Austrian Poland, on the theory that one day his Riflemen’s Alliance would form the nucleus of an army to free the land. The two were as disparate as Lincoln and Douglas: Pilsudski, gaunt, one-track, humorous, dynamic, with the gigantic, inspirational mind of a fanatical leader; Smigly-Rydz, graceful, versatile, serious, dull, with a big mind, too, but a professor’s logical, inquisitive, with a good memory. But they liked each other, and Pilsudski persuaded the young student to give up painting and take up sharpshooting. He did, so enthusiastically that by 1916 he won a gold watch as the best marksman in the (then Austrian) Army. He fought under his leader against Russia on the Eastern Front of the World War, and afterwards fought the ill-armed Bolsheviks in Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine. Such claim as Edward Smigly-Rydz can lay to being a military genius rests principally on those experiences and on the teachings of the French military mission which went to Poland in 1920 to show the young country a thing or two about military science. Unfortunately the Frenchmen, who by nature are the worst colonists in the world, regarded Poland as a colony. Edward Smigly-Rydz took neither to them nor to their theories of dynamic defense against modern fire power, preferred a strategy of enveloping attack, what Pilsudski called the strategy of “open spaces.” During last year’s Polish Army maneuvers, the German military attache asked what use Poland, with its terrible roads, had for tanks. The Marshal smiled and said: “Ah, but you have good roads.” The Marshal is a scholar-technician rather than a leader-drillmaster. Like France’s Maurice Gamelin, he is an admirer and close student of Napoleon. In his study are two busts and four portraits of the Little Corporal. Softspoken, shy, gentle, he cannot be profane or brutal when he tries. The Army men around him, from whom he derives his power, wish he would puff up, bark and curse in public; wanting that, they have built him up as Poland’s Strong, Silent General.

Poland, the land of Copernicus, Chopin, Mme Curie, Paderewski, is one place where estheticism and the laboratory spirit are not considered synonymous with general debility. And so it has been perfectly natural for Edward Smigly-Rydz to keep up his painting. One of the works of which the clean-shaven, egg-bald General is proudest is a self-portrait, with a beard and a shock of hair.

He lives a life of almost ascetic simplicity, smokes the cheapest cigarets; lives in a quiet eight-room apartment decorated with old porcelain, with crystal and with Renaissance, 19th Century French and Smigly-Rydz oils; never wears more than one medal; rides early each morning; likes to stay at home with his charming, quiet wife, who does her own cooking and thinks the wives of Messrs. Beck and Moscicki are chronic climbers.

The Job. To help him in the task which the mad whims of geography, history and Adolf Hitler thrust upon him last week, Marshal Smigly-Rydz had an able and unpronounceable panel of generals and colonels. Also behind him was Poland’s Parliament, 96 businessmen, professors, writers in the Senate, 208 bureaucrats in the Sejm, 304 yes-men chosen from a maze of political parties by a rigged system of electoral committees. This parliamentary front was assembled last week to enact emergency war measures.

But far more important, of course, were those 4,000,000 assistants who were the hope and sinew of General Smigly-Rydz’s defense: the standing army of 18,000 officers, 37,000 noncoms, 211,000 privates, 27,000 frontier defense corps (Soviet border), 29,000 State police (on a military basis); the 1,500,000 trained reserves, some of whom are poorly equipped; the 2,000,000 untrained, undernourished conscripts; the 6,000 sailors; the 3,950,000 horses; the inadequate 28,000 motor vehicles; the 10,000 pilots, machine gunners, mechanics of the air force.

The war which this crew, long on numbers but short on experience, with plenty of horses but not enough trucks and planes, with their share of guts but not too many guns, was undertaking last week was not just a bilateral frip-frap over a port called Danzig and a 50-mile wide carpet to the sea. It was, in the eyes of General Smigly-Rydz, a holy war. It was a war to stop the Devil, A. Hitler, before he put horns, cleft feet and an arrowy tail on every good Catholic in Poland. It was a war in which Providence would play a part. “We shall win,” declared the Premier, “by the Holy Passion of Our Lord. He will lead us to victory.” But before the week was out, the Devil’s legions had captured Czestochowa, the Black Madonna’s hometown.

It was an urgent war to keep Poland from falling apart. General Smigly-Rydz’s main concern was not whether it was to be a world war or a local war, whether casualties were to be ten or 10,000,000. What was important was that Poland, which had so often divided, should not divide again.Holy, and bloody, wars have been fought before: Crusades, the Japanese against Communism, the Spanish Catholic Church against Communism. But this war was being fought, as no war had ever been fought before, to keep a country together against the black forces of paganism. And it was up to 4,000,000 men aided by the indirect action of some Allies, to do the job. “The Army,” said Edward Smigly-Rydz once, “is the national glue.”

*Pronunciation: Shmigwy-Ridzh. Meaning: nimble-mushroom. The Marshal’s family name was Rydz (Mushroom), indicating peasant origin. But because of the quickness of both his wits and his body, his companions in the Pilsudski Legions gave him the sobriquet Smigly (Nimble). He sometimes wears it before, sometimes behind Rydz, prefers it behind so that the name has less meaning.