There were no mass bombings, no gas chambers, civilians were not shot in the streets with machine guns. Nevertheless, as many as four million people were not counted in Poland after the Great War, and the losses in soldiers were greater than during World War II!
Józef Piłsudski was a romantic, but he was realistic about the war. From the book "Piłsudski to read" we learn what the marshal thought:
We've had a catastrophe in the last decade. This catastrophe was the European war. She was going to Poland at that time in some lightning rush, in some leopard leaps, bewildering with the speed of her development and inexorable necessity .
At the same time, the Poles were in an uncomfortable position because, as he continued:
Poland (...) did not seek war, it did not want war, it did not cause war (...). [For the warring powers] Poland was only supposed to be a theater of war (...) [so] the usual repertoire of measures related to the theater of war was applied to Poland. So first terror in the broadest sense of the word.
As history later showed, it was not yet the terror that the Nazi Third Reich and Stalinist Soviet Union were able to apply in the occupied territories, which significantly expanded the meaning of the word.
Collective burial of British and German soldiers, 1916/1917 (source:public domain).
The first victim - Kalisz
However, the one used two decades earlier was terrifying. The inhabitants of Kalisz were the first to experience it from the Germans, even before Józef Piłsudski's riflemen set out to fight for an independent Poland as an ally of Austria-Hungary and Germany.
The border town was seized without problems, and its misfortune began on the night of August 3-4, when German patrols mistakenly strafed each other in the streets in the darkness. The occupiers blamed the city for the death of the soldiers and decided to punish it in an exemplary manner: Kalisz was fired upon by machine guns and artillery for several days.
In the streets, the Germans shot about 250 inhabitants. Houses, shops and offices were robbed and most of the buildings were burned. In the breaks between a truly Hun orgy of barbarism those who could took what they could from their property and fled. During the first month of the war, a town with a population of 70,000 was destroyed.
Z. Najder and R. Kuźniar quote the marshal's words in the book "Piłsudski to read":
I did not want to let the living body of our homeland be cut with swords to new borders of states and nations, but only Poles were missing. I did not want to allow the Polish saber to be missing on the scales of fate weighing over our heads, on the scarves on which the swords were thrown! That our saber was small, that it was not worthy of a great nation of 20 million, it was not our fault.
He did not allow. Riflemen, and then legionnaires fought under Polish banners and eagles. Poland, however, was not a party to the First World War. Many Poles fought under the banners, emblems and signs of foreign, invasive armies and - what is worse - added Józef Piłsudski: Poles had to be the avant-garde and waged a war from the very first moment as a fratricide.
A bullet for my compatriot
In fact, on the battlefields, it was almost never known when a blow or a bullet intended for an enemy in a foreign uniform would reach a compatriot . All the more so as around 3.4 million Poles wore uniforms during the months and years of the Great War.
The demolished palace of Leopold Weiss in Kalisz, 1914 (source:public domain).
About 1.4 million of them were drafted into the army of Emperor Franz Joseph I, for a total of 8-9 million mobilized. In the army of Emperor Wilhelm II there were about 780,000 for a total of 13-14 million soldiers, and in the army of Tsar Nicholas II - 1.2 million out of 13.7-15.8 million soldiers. So the chance for a fratricidal fight was high.
An inhabitant of Congress Poland, countess and well-known diarist Maria née Łubieńska Górska, heard from a Polish soldier in a Russian uniform: Everything can be endured, but like an opponent who is being shot at, raises his hands up and falls, shouting:"Jesus , Maria! " - it is too much, a man cannot bear it .
And some could not stand it, and one such case was quoted in May 1915 by Dziennik Poznański, reporting after the Viennese press:
During the recent violent Russian attacks on our positions in the Carpathians, an officer of the Austrian lancers, a Pole, Count L. S. (...) fell ill with a severe nervous disorder, so that he had to be taken to a sanatorium .
Poles served in the armies of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Prussia. General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki and the staff of the 1st Polish Corps in Russia, 1918 (source:public domain).
The reason was a terrible adventure in this battle - killed a Russian soldier with his saber, who, falling down, shouted in Polish:"Jesus, Maria! God! Have mercy on me! ". These words and the knowledge that he had killed his compatriot had such an effect on him that he fainted and in his illness the reminder of it haunts him all the time. No nation in the world is in such a situation at present.
It's a pity to look…
It was not entirely true, because fate also dressed in hostile uniforms, for example, Ukrainians from Galicia and Russia, and the French from Alsace and Lorraine, who ended up in the German army. However, it was the Poles who were the most affected by this misfortune. It is a pity to look at these young and beautiful boys either going to the slaughter or forced to kill their compatriots - wrung her hands the aforementioned Maria Górska.
Indeed, among Poles who had fought for four years mainly in the partitioning armies on various fronts of the World War, died, according to interwar estimates, as many as 387,000 - including:60,000 in the Russian army, 108,000 in the German army and 219,000 in the Austrian army, and 786,000 were wounded or disabled.
German transport column passing through the destroyed Polish city (source:public domain).
However, the same estimates say that in fact, the number of killed people probably reached 450,000, and the wounded - 900,000. people . It was difficult to give precise numbers, because many Poles were classified on the lists of the fallen and in cemeteries according to their citizenship as Russians, Germans or Austro-Hungarian residents.
For comparison, during World War II it is estimated that about 110-300 thousand Polish soldiers died - depending on the method of counting the fallen members of the Underground, soldiers who died in captivity and murdered in camps.
All the plagues of war
However, these were only military losses, and yet the front line that swept through the Polish lands several times, the occupation of the territory and the terror mentioned by the marshal also decimated civilians. The war of 1914-1918 was accompanied - as always - by hunger and epidemics, as well as forced migrations.
When retreating from the Kingdom, the Russians burned villages and huts, driving the people like rams , in distant and foreign countries - the marshal described the evacuation of the population to the east. The other way - hundreds of thousands of people sent to work there were sent to Germany and recruitment resembled the round-ups known from World War II many times.
Some of the people left voluntarily somewhere far beyond the battlefields. Additionally, according to estimates, a million fewer babies were born during the war than it would have been born into in times of peace.
In total, during the Great War in the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, over 200,000 died civilians, in the Prussian partition - 50,000 . It is not known how many died in Galicia. It is known, however, that in the fall of 1914, when almost 90 percent of Galicia was under the tsarist occupation, only from Krakow about 60,000 were evacuated civilians. The rest suffered from cold and hunger.
During the defense of the Przemyśl fortress in the fall and winter of 1914-1915, despairing peasants from the areas between the besieged and besieged, often even abandoned their own little children in the hope that the soldiers will find them and take care of them.
During the siege of the Przemyśl Fortress in 1914-1915, local peasants, exposed to artillery fire, abandoned their children, hoping that soldiers would take care of them. Fort X "Orzechowce" in 1915 (source:public domain).
After the liberation in the spring and summer of 1915, it was often not better - summary field courts issued (according to various sources) from about 30,000 to even 60,000 death sentences for the alleged betrayal of Austria-Hungary ! Mostly Ruthenians, i.e. Ukrainians, suffered, but Poles were also among the victims of the military justice system.
Until the end of the war, apart from a few areas, the majority of the Polish population experienced food shortages, poverty and disease, and press releases and obituaries made everyone aware of how bloody this war, called the Great War, was.
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"Piłsudski to read" is a selection of the Marshal's best texts covering over thirty years of his life and political activity. From conspiratorial appeals, through orders from the commander of the Legions, the speech of the head of state, to love letters.
They show Piłsudski not only as a statuesque statesman, but also as an ardent revolutionist or romantic lover. Many of the Marshal's statements remain surprisingly relevant to this day.