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The Battle of Warsaw, 1920
"It was these characteristics - courage, unorthodoxy, and secrecy - coupled with success, which made Pilsudski a legendary figure"- J.F.C. FULLER
This strange volcanic man, whose soul was in revolt with civilization, was destined to cross swords with Pilsudski, who was as violently anti-Russian as he was violently anti-European. Of the latter, Lord D'Abernon, who had exceptional opportunities to watch him, says: "An ardent patriot and a man of immense courage and force of character. A pronounced sceptic about orthodox methods, whether applied to military affairs or politics; he loves danger, his pulse only beating at a normal rate when he is in imminent personal peril.... Next to danger, he is said to love intrigue - a revolutionary by temperament and circumstances, his ingrained proclivity is to the secret and indirect."
It was these characteristics - courage, unorthodoxy, and secrecy - coupled with success, which made Pilsudski a legendary figure. The day before his death, on May 12, 1935, he turned to General Smigly-Rydz and said to him: "To be vanquished and not surrender is victory, to vanquish and rest on laurels is defeat." The first half of this saying sums up his generalship.
Before we describe the campaign which immediately followed the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw, it is as well to look at the opposing forces. Both were improvised, chaotically equipped and suffered from over-rapid growth. In November, 1918, when Pilsudski assumed command, the Polish army consisted of 24 battalions, three squadrons and five batteries; yet by January, 1919, these had respectively been raised to 100, 70, and 80, in all comprising some 110,000 men. A year later this figure had risen to 600,000 men, organized in 21 divisions and seven brigades of cavalry; but most were still in formation. Though manpower was sufficient, Poland possessed no arsenals and lacked munitions. A greater difficulty was an adequate supply of horses, because during six years of war the country had been searched repeatedly for remounts, and, as will shortly be seen, deficiency in the cavalry arm was Pilsudski's greatest wakness.
What of his opponent's army? Tukhachevski one said to Fervacque: "The Russian Army is not like your - the French. It is a horde, and its strength is that of a horde." Though these words were spoken during the World War, they are equally applicable to the campaign of 1920, because the army faced Pilsudski was nothing more than a horde of peasants - whose sole idea was to get home - leavened with a comparatively small number of fanatical revolutionaries. Though it was better equipped than the Poles - the rounding up of Denekin's and Kolchak's forces had supplied it with millions of pounds worth of French and British armaments - it was lamentably short of military transport and trained officers. The former consisted of thousands of peasants' carts, and the deficiency in the latter was made good by commissioning hundreds of officers of the old Imperial Army. But as their loyalty was suspect, Trotsky attached commissars to each formation. Most of these men were Jews, and, according to Lord D'Abernon, "they did everything in their divisions - commandeered food - gave orders - explained objectives."
Both Poles and Russians desperately wanted peace, yet only on their own terms, which were: for the former, the old frontier of 1772; for the latter, the continuance of world revolution. So it came about that, when on December 22, 1920, the Soviet Government invited the Polish Government to negotiate a peace, though the proposal was accepted, nothing came of it (J.F.C. Fuller, "A MILITARY HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD VOLUME III FROM THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR TO THE END OF WORLD WAR II", A Da Capo Paperback, New York 1957).
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