White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 by Norman Davies

Author:Norman Davies [Davies, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781446466865
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

f2 ‘Lyakh’ was an abusive term for the Poles.

f3 See description, see here.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE BATTLE OF WARSAW

RECORDED impressions of the city of Warsaw on the eve of the Red Army’s attack present a bewildering confusion of feverish activity and inexplicable lethargy. Lord D’Abernon’s diary emphasises the lethargy:

26 July I continue to marvel at the absence of panic, at the apparent absence indeed of any anxiety. Were a methodical system of defence being organised the confidence of the public might be understood, but all the best troops are being sent to Lwów, leaving Warsaw unprotected.

27 July The Prime Minister, a peasant proprietor, has gone off today to get his harvest in. Nobody thinks this extraordinary.

2 August The insouciance of the people here is beyond belief. One would imagine the country in no danger and the Bolsheviks a thousand miles away.

3 August Made an expedition along the Ostrów road … I expected it to be blocked with troops and munition waggons, also with refugees. As a matter of fact there was very little traffic. Curiously enough most of the people whom I saw putting up barbed wire were Jews. This was surprising as the Jews are suspected of being an element favourable to the Bolsheviks.… The population here has seen so many invasions that it has ceased to pay attention to them.

7 August I visited this afternoon the proposed new front in the direction of Minsk Mazowiecki. A treble entanglement of barbed wire is being put round Warsaw at a radius of 20 kilometres, and a certain number of trenches have been dug… The work did not appear to be well designed.

13 August There is singularly little alarm. The upper classes have already left town, in many cases having placed their pictures and other valuables in charge of the museum authorities. Warsaw has been so often occupied by foreign troops that the event in itself causes neither the excitement nor the alarm which would be produced in a less experienced city.1

Feliks Dzierżyński interrogating prisoners and refugees on the other side of the wire at Wyszków, was conscious of greater activity. He cabled his impressions to Lenin :

The peasants are standing aloof from the war and resisting mobilization. The working masses of Warsaw are awaiting the arrival of the Red Army but, owing to the lack of leadership and the reign of terror, are not coming forward actively. … The Socialist Party is conducting frenzied agitation for the defence of Warsaw. … Men and women are being rounded up in their thousands and sent to dig earthworks. Barbed wire entanglements are being set up and there have been rumours of barricades in the streets. To raise the warlike temper of the populace, the Poles have released floods of appeals, in which they say that one powerful blow will suffice to repulse the tired and weakened Red Army. Everything is being mobilized for this one blow. Women’s shock brigades have been formed. The volunteers, composed in the main of the pampered sons of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia are behaving desperately.

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