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Within an hour of the Leader's death on May 12, 1935, 49-year-old Edward Smigly-Rydz* became Inspector-General (or Generalissimo) of the Army, Fourteen months later he had the Premier send out a circular to all Government ministries proclaiming him "Second Citizen" of the Republic, next in rank in every way to the President, who by the Constitution was Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Last week the President signed his own superiority away. Marshal Smigly-Rydz was made Commander-in-Chief, was designated successor to the Presidency in case of vacancy before the war ends. President Moscicki's term expires next year.
Somewhere between May 1935, when he was an obscure army man, and this week, when he was dictator of Poland, Edward Smigly-Rydz picked up the designation Strong Man. Although it fits him as ill as the style Athlete would fit Adolf Hitler, it stuck. Perhaps his profile (with an army hat on, for he has little forehead and no hair) accounts for it, perhaps pressagentry. Whatever the reason, he is the gentlest Strong Man ever to make thrones totter. An orphan at nine, he grew up to love painting, history, philosophy, went to Cracow to study them. On the side he acted beautifully in amateur theatricals. He distinguished himself as an athlete, but was no bonecrusher; fenced gracefully, played keen tennis, rode like an Arab, and was the only one at the University who could swim Jagellonia Lake. It was in Cracow that he first met Josef Pilsudski, who was organizing rifle clubs throughout Austrian Poland, on the theory that one day his Riflemen's Alliance would form the nucleus of an army to free the land. The two were as disparate as Lincoln and Douglas: Pilsudski, gaunt, one-track, humorous, dynamic, with the gigantic, inspirational mind of a fanatical leader; Smigly-Rydz, graceful, versatile, serious, dull, with a big mind, too, but a professor's logical, inquisitive, with a good memory. But they liked each other, and Pilsudski persuaded the young student to give up painting and take up sharpshooting. He did, so enthusiastically that by 1916 he won a gold watch as the best marksman in the (then Austrian) Army. He fought under his leader against Russia on the Eastern Front of the World War, and afterwards fought the ill-armed Bolsheviks in Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine. Such claim as Edward Smigly-Rydz can lay to being a military genius rests principally on those experiences and on the teachings of the French military mission which went to Poland in 1920 to show the young country a thing or two about military science. Unfortunately the Frenchmen, who by nature are the worst colonists in the world, regarded Poland as a colony. Edward Smigly-Rydz took neither to them nor to their theories of dynamic defense against modern fire power, preferred a strategy of enveloping attack, what Pilsudski called the strategy of "open spaces." During last year's Polish Army maneuvers, the German military attache asked what use Poland, with its terrible roads, had for tanks. The Marshal smiled and said: "Ah, but you have good roads." The Marshal is a scholar-technician rather than a leader-drillmaster. Like France's Maurice Gamelin, he is an admirer and close student of Napoleon. In his study are two busts and four portraits of the Little Corporal. Softspoken, shy, gentle, he cannot be profane or brutal when he tries. The Army men