(5 of 6)
Poland, the land of Copernicus, Chopin, Mme Curie, Paderewski, is one place where estheticism and the laboratory spirit are not considered synonymous with general debility. And so it has been perfectly natural for Edward Smigly-Rydz to keep up his painting. One of the works of which the clean-shaven, egg-bald General is proudest is a self-portrait, with a beard and a shock of hair.
He lives a life of almost ascetic simplicity, smokes the cheapest cigarets; lives in a quiet eight-room apartment decorated with old porcelain, with crystal and with Renaissance, 19th Century French and Smigly-Rydz oils; never wears more than one medal; rides early each morning; likes to stay at home with his charming, quiet wife, who does her own cooking and thinks the wives of Messrs. Beck and Moscicki are chronic climbers.
The Job. To help him in the task which the mad whims of geography, history and Adolf Hitler thrust upon him last week, Marshal Smigly-Rydz had an able and unpronounceable panel of generals and colonels. Also behind him was Poland's Parliament, 96 businessmen, professors, writers in the Senate, 208 bureaucrats in the Sejm, 304 yes-men chosen from a maze of political parties by a rigged system of electoral committees. This parliamentary front was assembled last week to enact emergency war measures.
But far more important, of course, were those 4,000,000 assistants who were the hope and sinew of General Smigly-Rydz's defense: the standing army of 18,000 officers, 37,000 noncoms, 211,000 privates, 27,000 frontier defense corps (Soviet border), 29,000 State police (on a military basis); the 1,500,000 trained reserves, some of whom are poorly equipped; the 2,000,000 untrained, undernourished conscripts; the 6,000 sailors; the 3,950,000 horses; the inadequate 28,000 motor vehicles; the 10,000 pilots, machine gunners, mechanics of the air force.
The war which this crew, long on numbers but short on experience, with plenty of horses but not enough trucks and planes, with their share of guts but not too many guns, was undertaking last week was not just a bilateral frip-frap over a port called Danzig and a 50-mile wide carpet to the sea. It was, in the eyes of General Smigly-Rydz, a holy war. It was a war to stop the Devil, A. Hitler, before he put horns, cleft feet and an arrowy tail on every good Catholic in Poland. It was a war in which Providence would play a part. "We shall win," declared the Premier, "by the Holy Passion of Our Lord. He will lead us to victory." But before the week was out, the Devil's legions had captured Czestochowa, the Black Madonna's hometown.
It was an urgent war to keep Poland from falling apart. General Smigly-Rydz's main concern was not whether it was to be a world war or a local war, whether casualties were to be ten or 10,000,000. What was important was that Poland, which had so often divided, should not divide again.