But far from being crushed, the Polish army was stronger than it had ever been throughout the campaign. While Tukhachevskys forces had diminished - they numbered less than 150,000 men actively engaged on both fronts - the Polish army approached the total of 370,000 soldiers - poorly trained and unde
By the time Tukhachevskys forces reached the Bug River on July 22–23, Polish resistance began to harden. The French, who had always maintained a large, well-informed military mission in Poland, felt that Pilsudski was somehow uninterested in the military disaster. They were convinced that he was m
Polish Chief of the General Staff Tadeusz Rozwadowski, a soldier who graduated from Austrian military schools, returned from a military mission in Paris, knew that the Russian position was not as bright as it seemed. Any invasion of Poland from Russia inevitably had to take two axes quite distant fr
In April 1920, Pilsudski invaded all of Ukraine and entered kyiv, earning the enmity of the Soviets forever. By doing so, he hoped to establish a Republic of Ukraine allied with Poland against Russia. His hopes were dashed; all anti-Bolshevist forces having been eliminated except those based in Cr
On August 10, 1903, around seven oclock in the evening, a metro employee arriving in Barbès saw the beginnings of a fire in his train. He immediately sends the passengers down. The flames are extinguished - or rather we believe they are extinguished - then the train leaves empty, pushed by another t
The Canal Saint-Martin also brings major problems to the engineers. Temporarily dry, we must build a tunnel passing five meters below the bottom of its bed.But naturally the most serious obstacle is the Seine. Between the Châtelet and the boulevard Saint-Michel, it is necessary to successively cross
Now Parisians gaze with curiosity at the astonishing aedicule of Porte Maillot, whose lines remind some of a dragonfly spreading its wings, to others a modest upturned umbrella. The boldest walkers descend the stairs, they marvel at the delicious temperature that reigns in the entrance hall. They in
The labors of Hercules began. Two thousand navvies, working in day and night shifts, attacked the Vincennes-Maillot section. Every day, a thousand cubic meters of rubble had to be evacuated. It was calculated in 1905 that this rubble, installed over the entire surface of the Place de la Concorde, wo
In 1884, the Council of State had classified the metropolitan as a railway of general interest, to be conceded directly by the State. Should the state favor private companies? The City protested vehemently, refusing to be stripped of its rights. She wanted her own metro, a metro that she could be fa
A few months later, the lawyer Le Hir imagined the plan of a vast underground network comprising six intersecting lines and passing below the Seine.At the beginning of the Third Republic, various projects were presented to the municipality. One included two lines, north-south and east-west. Another
In the 1880s, supporters and opponents of the future Paris underground network clashed. Discussions were lively in the audience. Everyone came up with peremptory arguments, but the detractors of the metro fought back with particular vehemence. Their reasoning was sometimes unexpected: Deep works,
My real kingdom will be the Trocadéro.First the aquarium, with sea waterbrought from Trouville, the aquarium whose seahorses, says Jules Renard, stand as straight as tie pins. We see all sorts of tropical fish that take your breath away, others that circulate between the ropes of a silted up wreck.
They are all there, the beauties of time, unless they show up at the Folies-Marigny where the Wallenda sisters dive under water for three minutes. The rue de Paris is the meeting place for plumed and belated vivacious people. Le Diable Boiteux collects the slightest remarks of the parlotes, where th
Appalled, today we lookall around us at what remains of the modern-style, that is to say the decorative art of 1900:the Maxims restaurant (which looks like, says Valéry, to an old submarine which would have sunk with all its period decor), the retrospective room of the Museum of Decorative Arts, the
When I was taken to the Champs-Élysées, to play on the sandy site of the Cirque dÉté, which had recently been demolished, as the ruined facade of the old Palace of Industry descended, I saw the Grand and the Petit-Palais and open the grand perspective Alexandre-III.These buildings were not made of c
Two revelations. Two undefeated peoples, of intense energy, of lightning and hitherto unnoticed fortune prevail:Germany and Japan. The Reich Palace, under its rustic aspect, under the steeples of green and yellow wood, hides an explosion of method, of science, of labour; its a huge practical strate
What a strange destiny to find oneself intimately linked to these people, to think that all their miserly money will be used to drink, to prepare, from the China Sea to the Adriatic, the great Muscovite expansion! Yes, the money of these careful, tidy and hard-working owners will be used to destroy
All these people have noble and serious faces, as in their photographs in the Mariani album. They are in evening dress, preceded by a wave of ushers in short breeches and silver chains. Sabers, helmets and top hats sparkle; we play Massenets Marche solemn. M. Loubet crosses old Paris, masterpiece o
Between two openwork azure minarets and polychrome statues surmounted by banners, adorned with cabochons, at the top of an immense flamboyant arch (which earned it the nickname of the Salamander), flies away, on a golden ball, a mermaid wearing the hat of the boat of the City of Paris, with a flat s
When I returned to Paris, around the Exhibition was ending, the pasteboard knew me, the golden domes were fading away under those pearl-gray mists that Copenhagen porcelain had just made fashionable. Then everything disappeared. , the negroes vanished like those magicians of the Thousand and One Nig
Between the years 19-15 a. C. Emperor Augustus concluded the Roman conquest of Hispania, just as three decades earlier Julius Caesar did the same with Gaul, both constituting two of the most important regions of the newborn Roman Empire. But now it was time to protect them, especially the second one
Throughout history there are multiple examples of the use of animals for war. And to be more specific, as weapons of war itself. Even germ warfare has roots that go back beyond antiquity, as Adrienne Mayor brilliantly exposed in her fantastic book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows &Scorpion Bombs. But in m
Julius Caesar climbed the steps of power in a meteoric rise; the Senate quickly named him dictator for life. In Antiquity, a dictator was one who received full powers from the Assembly to carry out a specific mission in a given time. But he assumes them for life. However, Caesar lacks a royal titl
Võ Nguyên Giáp was born in 1911 or 1912 in An Xá (Vietnam). He was a Vietnamese general during the Vietnam War and the Indochina War, winner of the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ. At its simplest and shortest, General Vo Nguyên Giap entered military history and the military and strategic studies of poli