PARIS 1919 (40 page)

The battle for Warsaw was one of the great triumphs of Polish history. The army, which had been racked with jealousy and infighting among the officers, pulled itself together in the face of a common enemy. “I continue to marvel at the absence of panic,” wrote a British diplomat, “at the apparent absence indeed of all anxiety.” Pi
sudski calmly planned a daring counterattack. On August 16 Polish forces attacked the Soviet forces in the rear, cutting their lines of communication. The Soviet commander began a hasty retreat. By the end of September 1920, Lenin asked for peace. The Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921, gave Poland a border in the east well beyond what the peacemakers had recommended and added even more minorities to its population: 4 million Ukrainians, 2 million Jews and a million Byelorussians.
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Pi
sudski did not adjust well to peace or to democratic politics. In 1926 he seized power in a coup, and until his death in 1935 he did his best to run Poland on military lines. His great rival Dmowski never held office and moved even further to the right. Paderewski resigned as prime minister at the end of 1919, deeply hurt by the way he was blamed for the Allies' refusal to give Poland everything it wanted and by the attacks on his wife for being tactless and interfering (which she was).
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He never lived in Poland again. In 1922, he tried a few notes on the piano and found to his amazement that he still enjoyed playing. His second career was as successful as the first. He died in New York in the summer of 1941, happy in the knowledge that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and that there might again be hope for his country.

Poland itself survived its difficult birth and even flourished for a time. It had not won back all its historic territories, but it was still a big country and it had its window on the Baltic. These gains, however, came at a huge cost. The powers, even the French, thought the Poles greedy and feckless. And its neighbors had much to resent: Lithuania, the Vilna region; the Soviet Union, the 150-mile-wide strip of what had been Russian territory; Czechoslovakia, the conflict over Teschen; and Germany, the corridor and Danzig. In the summer of 1939 Poland disappeared from the map yet again. When it surfaced again at the end of the Second World War, it was a strangely altered and shrunken Poland, emptied of its Jews by the Nazis and of its Germans by the Soviets, and moved two hundred miles to the west.

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Czechs and Slovaks

WHERE THE POLES tended to bring exasperated sighs, even from their supporters, the Czechs basked in general approval. The Poles were dashing and brave, but quite unreasonable; the Rumanians charming and clever, but sadly devious; the Yugoslavs, well, rather Balkan. The Czechs were refreshingly Western. “Of all the people whom we saw in the course of our journey,” reported an American relief mission that traveled throughout the former Austria-Hungary in January 1919, “the Czechs seemed to have the most ability and common sense, the best organization, and the best leaders.”
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The Czech delegates, its prime minister, Karel Kramář, and the foreign minister, Edvard Bene
, presented their case to the Supreme Council in February 1919. Bene
did most of the talking. Charles Seymour, the American expert, was deeply impressed: “He had done much to organize the revolution that swept aside the Habsburgs and to build up the CzechoSlovak army in Siberia; his diplomatic skill had combined with the solid honesty of President Tomá
Masaryk to win the recognition of the Allies for the infant state.”
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Everyone in Paris knew how Bene
and Masaryk had devoted their lives to freeing their people from the Austrian empire. Everyone knew the extraordinary story of the army of Czechs who had surrendered to the Russians only to find themselves in the middle of the revolution; how they were fighting their way thousands of miles across Siberia toward the Pacific and freedom. Almost everyone in Paris liked and admired the Czechs and their leaders. (Lloyd George, who referred to Bene
as “the little French jackal” and thought the Czech claims excessive, was an exception.) Bene
and Masaryk were unfailingly cooperative, reasonable and persuasive as they stressed the Czechs' deep-seated democratic traditions and their aversion to militarism, oligarchy, high finance, indeed all that the old Germany and Austria-Hungary had stood for.
³

This being said, neither the British nor the Americans were particularly interested in the new little country, which looked like a tadpole with its head in the west and its tail tapering off in the east, sandwiched between Poland to the north and Austria and Hungary to the south. The French were interested, not for sentimental reasons but for security. France wanted a country strong enough to join with Poland and the new South Slav state to block both Bolshevism and Germany. That meant endowing Czechoslovakia with control of crucial railways, a position on the great central European waterway, the Danube, and adequate coal.
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Bene
presented Czechoslovakia's claims to the Supreme Council on February 5, the day after Venizelos presented Greek claims and the day before Feisal came to speak for Arab independence. He had an easier task than either, because Czechoslovakia had already been recognized by the powers, and most of the territory it wanted—the Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, and the Hungarian province of Slovakia— was already in its possession. Much of this was due to Bene
himself and the help he got from France.

When he arrived in Paris in 1915, Bene
was an obscure sociology professor from Prague representing something called the Czechoslovak National Council. Four years later he was foreign minister of a new state. Not a romantic figure like Venizelos or Feisal or a great soldier like Pi
sudski, Bene
was short, ordinary-looking and pedantic, a dull writer and an uninspiring speaker. (The French thought this should appeal to the Anglo-Saxons.) He had no apparent hobbies or vices, and few close friends. His relations with Masaryk, to whom he was devoted, were always curiously formal. But Bene
was enormously energetic and efficient. In Paris during the war he cultivated everyone, from Foreign Ministry officials to leading intellectuals, who might help the Czech cause. Where Bene
gained French attention, his charming, handsome colleague the Slovak Milan Štefánik won hearts. Štefánik, already well known before the war in Paris as an astronomer, made a huge impression when he took out French citizenship and become an ace in the French air force.
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