The day before that momentous Armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany – the conclusion to four years of shattering warfare – one seemingly inconspicuous man, face half-obscured with a heavy moustache, finally returned to Warsaw after spending a year languishing in a German prison.
His, however, had been a battle for two liberations: his own and that of his nation. Józef Piłsudski epitomized the Polish spirit, and his arrival in the war-torn Polish city, allegedly with a hero’s welcome from its citizens, marked a new start for a Polish state which had spent 123 years sliced and pummeled to fit a map of Europe which unashamedly made clear it had no place for Poles.
The landscape of the newly-independent Poland in the immediate years after WWI has Piłsudski at its very roots: released as a result of declining German clout, he was the face – the voice – of the multitudes within Poland, driving a dispatch to world leaders in the days after his return that ‘the Polish state is being established in accordance with the will of the whole nation’ and that ‘henceforth no foreign army shall enter Poland until we have formally communicated our will in the matter.’ Piłsudski, who had commanded the Polish Legions unit in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was jailed in 1917 for encouraging those under him to refuse to swear allegiance to the decaying German and Austrian forces following a German refusal to support full Polish independence. His dispatch cemented what he saw as Poland’s future – one which must be Poland’s alone – and was a message of resolve to ensure an independence the Poles alone could manipulate, swelled with a promise that the ‘Polish government will replace the rule of force…by a system built on the basis of order and justice.’[1]
Yet the Poland which rose from the ashes of war and splintered diplomacy was hardly founded in Piłsudski’s ideals of order and justice – at least, not at the start. Piłsudski had been incarcerated in the wake of the Act of the 5th November in 1916, a declaration by Germany and Austria to ensure the creation of a Polish nation, but with a catch: it would operate as a puppet-state at the mercy of the Central Powers.
