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NULLE PART
Quant à l’action, qui va commencer, elle se passe en Pologne, c’est-à-dire Nulle Part.
[As for the action about to begin, it takes place in Poland, that is, No Place.]
Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi (1896)
November 1918 was a good month for Maksymilian Ciężki. Revolution and disorder had broken out everywhere across the German Empire. The bumptious Kaiser had abdicated and sneaked off to the Netherlands. And the leaders of the Imperial Army had been made to sign an Armistice in a railway carriage somewhere in France. A soldier in the Imperial Army ought, perhaps, not to have been gleeful at these developments, but Maksymilian Ciężki was not an ordinary German soldier.
In the eastern provinces of the Empire most of the population were not German, did not want to speak German, and certainly did not want to be ruled by Germans. Since the previous year, some of them had been making plans, and Ciężki was among them. Maksymilian Ciężki was a member of the Boy Scouts before he was called up to serve on the Western Front, but being in the Boy Scouts in the so-called Grand Duchy of Posen didn’t mean tying knots, making camp-fires and helping old ladies across the road. The ‘Scouts’ were a front for the paramilitary wing of the Polish independence movement – the POWZP, or Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition. The ‘Partition’ – the very idea that Poland was divided amongst its imperial neighbours – was offensive to all Poles.
For Ciężki it might have been a good thing that he had been invalided home in February 1918. Either at Rheims or Soissons a mine blew up and half-buried him. Some sort of filth in the air got into his lungs and started an infection. Anyhow, it meant that he could spend some more time with the ‘Scouts’, organising, recruiting and stockpiling weapons; and once he’d recovered, he was spared the front, instead being sent off for training in wireless communications. From then on, the mysteries of radio provided intellectual sustenance, but a dangerous, secret ambition – nothing less than the independence of Poland – possessed his soul. Now, with disruption and chaos breaking out across Germany, was the time for action. Polish leaders had taken control in Warsaw; civil government in the ‘Prussian Partition’ could not go on without the support of local, Polish, people. The Polish People’s Guard was needed to keep order in Posen, or, to call it by its non-German name, Poznań, and Maksymilian Ciężki found himself elected to the local Soldiers’ Council. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end of German rule in the Prussian Partition.
The Prussian Partition was a dark spectre from history; and history, in Poland, has a baneful tendency to repeat itself. On the horizon in 1918 was a post-war peace conference, and the last one of those had not gone well for Poland. Following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Congress of Vienna had convened in November 1814. The then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, believed he had an answer to the ‘Polish Question’: the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Poland. On the other side of the table, Russia was interested in the attractive towns of Cracow and Thorn (Toruń), even though these were deep in what were the Austrian and Prussian zones of influence (and had nothing whatever to do with the defeated French). Tsar Alexander I, however, was a reasonable man. Instead of insisting on Cracow and Thorn, he would settle for being King of Poland. Castlereagh should be happy with that. The British minister had been saying he wanted to re-establish Poland. So all would be well.
As it turned out, the Kingdom of Poland did not cover much ‘Polish’ territory, since swathes of the old Polish lands remained within the territories ruled by Austria and Prussia, or within the Russian Empire beyond the boundary of the kingdom. Nor did the kingdom have a great deal of autonomy. In 1830 and again in 1863, there were rebellions against the Russian-inspired government, and after the second one, the new Tsar, Alexander II, had experienced enough nationalist discontent. Polish institutions were closed down in the kingdom and governmental activity in the Polish language was phased out. The Tsar ‘relinquished his duties’ as King of Poland; what this meant was that the kingdom was annexed to Russia and by 1874 Poland had ceased to exist. Poland was, according to a contemporary satirical French playwright, ‘No Place’.
Poland might have stayed unrecognised but for the man with the moustache. Certainly, in 1918, moustaches were in fashion, but this moustache was world-famous. It hung in festoons, in theatrical exuberance, in defiant luxury. It was a symbol, it defined the movement for liberation, it identified the man who wore it for those who had only heard him on the wireless and never seen him in the flesh; and it also served a practical purpose – to conceal the gap left after the teeth behind the moustache had been knocked out with a rifle butt in a Tsarist prison in Siberia in 1887.
In a country divided and ruled by three empires there were few opportunities to nurture leaders of a new republic. But one stood out: implacably hostile to Russia, a left-wing activist, and a constant advocate for Poland to regain her independence, by force if needs be. The moustache belonged to that man. He was Józef Piłsudski, and in 1918 he was in a German prison in Magdeburg. But his custodians knew they had a head-of-state-in-waiting and they had no pretensions to govern in Warsaw, where the Russians had been in control for over a hundred years. It was just a matter of working out how to win Piłsudski and a potentially independent Poland over to their side, rather than have it become an Allied puppet. So no one was surprised when, on 8 November 1918, Piłsudski was told he was free to go and a special train was laid on to take him to Warsaw, where he found ‘power lying in the streets’. Within days, and without bloodshed, Piłsudski had manoeuvred himself into a position of control in a new democratic system. The Republic of Poland was born.
But not in what the Poles called Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), that place which the Germans had bundled up into provinces such as the Grand Duchy of Posen, the homeland of Maksymilian Ciężki. Despite its name and the importance of the region, Wielkopolska was at risk of being left out of the new Polish state. Power-sharing with the Germans wasn’t working. The atmosphere was tense, the Germans’ grip was weakening and the province was preparing for a change. All that remained was to give the signal.
On 27 December 1918 there was a VIP visit and a speech in the centre of Poznań. The visitor and speaker was Ignacy Paderewski, world-renowned pianist and advocate of Polish rights. What he said was not important: his audience fully understood the sub-text, and on the next day the Wielkopolska insurgency began. Ciężki’s unit took over the railway station in Poznań. Their next assignment was to take control of Wronki, a nearby town. That was achieved without difficulty or bloodshed, but the revolution was not going so well elsewhere. The Germans had started to fight back. And just at the point when Wielkopolska needed every fighting man, Ciężki was struck down by his pulmonary problems.
Frustrated and inert, Ciężki languished on the sick list, until he thought of his signals experience. To the north of the old town at Poznań, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the Prussians had built a major fortification. The inhabitants of the two villages there had been cleared out, though their history of wine-growing was recognised in the official name by which the new fort was known, even if the locals called it the Citadel. By 1903, Fort Winiary had been modernised with the addition of a telegraph station and now it was in Polish hands. On 2 April 1919, Maksymilian Ciężki joined the Poznań radio unit at the Citadel.1
At the Citadel, Maksymilian Ciężki met another technician who was still in his teens. Antoni Palluth was just out of school and was one of those young men who wanted to seize his country’s destiny for himself – in other words, to throw the Germans out of their country. But for Palluth there was more to being involved in the uprising than national pride. His work was just where his interests and aptitude lay.
Antoni Palluth could pull magic from the air. There was something extraordinary about wireless telegraphy. Invisible, inaudible, undetectable, the air was full of ghostly messages. Yet with modern equipment it was possible to get the ai
r to disclose its secrets: out from the crumble of static it was possible to coax the rhythm of Morse. Sometimes the signal wavelength wandered about and sometimes the machine played up. And when the weather was bad, the chase was hard. But Palluth tended his machine and the machine responded to Palluth’s talent. Antoni Palluth was a first-rate radio engineer.
Palluth and Ciężki were not stationed together for long, but their encounter was a moment of enormous consequence. For these two young men embodied the new, technically focused country that Poland would become. They were the radio men. The comradeship between Ciężki and Palluth would last twenty-five years as they proved themselves capable of being at the forefront of what would become an international effort to break the German Enigma ciphers. For the moment, however, this collaboration was on hold. Palluth was called away to serve in the north of Wielkopolska in mid May and Ciężki was sent on another course later in the year.
Meanwhile, the post-war settlement of Poland needed to be completed, to avoid a re-run of 1814. In the aftermath of ranging armies, with a ravaged economy, thousands of dead, there was a peace conference. Again, as in 1814, the helpful British were suggesting new boundaries, talking airily about the re-establishment of a vigorous, independent Polish state. This time, however, in part thanks to their own tough fighters, the Poles had actually been invited to the party. Indeed, the French were keen to have them there. From the French perspective, the principal aim of the post-war settlement was to contain the Germans. Settling the borders between Germany and Poland was crucial. But it wasn’t just the French who were very positive about a Polish state. President Wilson’s basis for peace, his famous Fourteen Points, included, as Point Thirteen, the following:
An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
This was all very splendid. It provided fuel, of course, for the energetic conversation in the cigar-smoke-filled conference rooms of Paris. But Wilson’s Point Thirteen was not much more than an aspirational statement. The shape of the western frontier of Poland was going to look, on paper, roughly like it had until the late eighteenth century. But in the late eighteenth century, Germany did not exist as a state. For the Germans, the border ought to have been where it was in 1914, when Poland did not exist as a state. What about the chunks of eastern Germany, now reverting to being western Poland, which had been settled over many decades by Germans? At whose expense was the ‘access to the sea’ to be provided? And who were the underwriters of the international covenant of guarantee?
The newly re-established Poland thus had everything to worry about from its still-powerful German neighbour, whose troops were still in occupation of much of the country. Unfortunately, the Poles clearly didn’t understand the purpose of the conference. The conference wasn’t about clearing the Germans out of Poland, or about the viability and future prosperity of Poland. It was about the borders of Germany. And as far as the Allies were concerned, that consideration alone should settle the Polish question.
Except that ‘both Russia and Poland in February 1919 were states in their infancy, the one sixteen months old the other only four months old. Both were chronically insecure, gasping for life and given to screaming.’2 Neither of these countries was waiting to be told by the Great Powers at Versailles about decisions that had been ordained for their own good. They – or, more precisely, the Soviet Union – were going to settle the business themselves.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was the man behind the Soviet plan for Poland. ‘If Poland had become Soviet, if the Warsaw workers had received from Russia the help they expected and welcomed, the Versailles Treaty would have been shattered, and the entire international system built up by the victors would have been destroyed.’ This fantasy manifested itself as a secret plan called ‘Target Vistula’, named after the river running through the centre of Poland: a cover-name which rather gave the game away, even though the Bolsheviks claimed their operation was nothing more than the defence of borders.
The Polish-Soviet War began with the Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny pushing Polish forces out of the Ukraine. Then, on 5 July 1920, the Red Army began an offensive in the north-east of Poland under the leadership of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, already a general at the advanced age of 27. ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration’, ran Tukhachevsky’s stirring order of the day. The advance was rapid and spectacular. The Third Cavalry Corps – the fearsome Red Cossacks – rampaged across the north, while Tukhachevsky steadily rumbled towards the west. Russians closed up against the Vistula to the east of Warsaw. Warsaw was going to fall and the Bolsheviks would then be free to march across Europe. Lenin’s dream was going to be fulfilled at last.
In the resort town of Spa in Belgium, famous for its mineral water, the Allies were preparing for another dose of cigar smoke, this time, a conference on the topic of reparations. Unfortunately for the distinguished visitors to the Spa Conference, at the end of the first week of July 1920, what water there was came entirely from the air. The rain drenched the delegates and dampened the mood. If the troublesome business of reparations were not enough, the Poles had now raised a problem that was boiling on the far eastern fringes of Europe, a problem which was self-evidently one of the Poles’ own making. They had grabbed Wilno (Vilnius) and swathes of non-Polish-speaking land around Lwów (Lviv). They were being difficult about Danzig. And now the Poles wanted the Allies to help them stop the Russians.
It occurred to the British that the Russian advance into Poland might be serious: if there were no effective allied intervention to stop the Soviets in their westward drive, ‘the bloody baboonery of Bolshevism’, as Winston Churchill called it, could threaten the democracies of the West. The British had a democratic leader in David Lloyd George, the man who had brought victory to Britain in 1918. But Lloyd George’s authority was crumbling, weakened by his inability to impose order on the conference. To stave off his own political crisis, what Lloyd George needed was to be the man who brought peace to Europe and for that he needed the man from Wola Okrzejska.
Wola Okrzejska is about a 100km south-east of Warsaw, but it is so small it doesn’t feature on many maps. It is, however, a place embedded in the Polish subconscious, for it is the birthplace of Poland’s answer to Sir Walter Scott. Henryk Sienkiewicz was a Nobel prize-winning novelist whose name was known across the world in the first half of the twentieth century: every household had a copy of his novel Quo Vadis, about love and struggle among Christians in Nero’s Rome, which was translated into at least fifty languages and had been made into a movie three times already by 1924. In Poland, Sienkiewicz is probably better known for his patriotic historical novels set in the Polish Commonwealth of the seventeenth century, where dauntless Poles battled for the survival of their country against insurgent Cossacks, unstoppable Swedes and rapacious Muscovites. In 1920, the formidable Red Cossacks galloped freely across Poland, as in the bad old days described by Sienkiewicz, while the Red Army was marching inexorably on Warsaw.
It was, therefore, entirely apposite that in this political crisis Lloyd George should look for inspiration to another man from Wola Okrzejska. The man had been born in 1888 in a country house which his grandfather had bought from an uncle of Henryk Sienkiewicz. His name was, at one point, Ludwik Niemirowski, under which he had a glittering academic career, studying at universities in Lwów, Lausanne, London and Oxford. In 1907, now called Lewis Namier, he settled in Britain. When war broke out, Oxonian friends ‘plucked him out of the British Army (where his poor eyesight and guttural accent seemed likely to get him shot by his own side if not by the Germans) and placed him in the intelligence service at the Foreign Office.’3 Later Namier participated in the Versailles treaty discussions. In 1920, he was the established Foreign Office expert on Polish c
artography. It is the time-honoured role of the British at international peace conferences to propose lines on maps to deal with disputatious peoples and Namier had been busy with his pencil. The British proposed the boundary between the Russians and the Poles, one that they thought would put to bed the annoying problem of Poland’s eastern boundary and bring the war to a rapid end. The line was named after Namier’s boss, Lloyd George’s foreign secretary Lord Curzon. Given that he had nothing to do with it, it’s unfortunate that Lord Curzon is the man whose name this border bears and it is ironic, too, that the boundary was actually the creature of an expatriate Pole.
The Curzon Line runs roughly north and south along conveniently placed rivers, at least to the north. To the south the rivers behaved in a less convenient way and there was controversy about whether the line would go to the east of Lwów (thus placing Polish-speaking Lwów and its non-Polish surroundings in Poland) or to the west of Przemyśl (so giving both cities to the Ukraine, or to be more exact, the USSR). Both choices were bad: huge tracts of the country would be given up, whichever option was accepted. Under diplomatic pressure from the British, and with the news from the front getting worse every day, the Polish delegation caved in. The less bad version of the Curzon Line, with Lwów on the Polish side, would just about do. The Polish state was not yet two years old and already many hundreds of square miles were being ceded to the Russians. It was partition all over again. If the country was going to survive at all, the state needed something extraordinary, a modern miracle.
Lieutenant Stanisław Sroka worked as a radio man in Warsaw, handling the boring business of assessing intercepted Russian radio traffic, rather than finding glory at the front. It was tedious and depressing, but even in times of war, life goes on. Lieutenant Sroka’s sister was going to get married and as he was to give away the bride, the lieutenant asked for a leave of absence to carry out this important duty. The Russians, inconsiderately, did not order a ceasefire or a cessation of movement during the nuptials, so it was necessary for someone to cover the good lieutenant’s dull duties in military intelligence while the vodka was drunk and the dancing went on. There must have been a lot of vodka, because the officer whom Lieutenant Sroka chose to fill in for him was asked to cover for two weeks. His choice was another army lieutenant, but unlike Sroka, the replacement was a man who had read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Gold Bug. In The Gold Bug a simple cipher led the hero to buried treasure: fabulous stuff and something which captured the imagination. Jan Kowalewski, the replacement lieutenant, put his reading to good use. In those two weeks, he turned radio interception into a different sort of treasure which captured the imagination of the most senior members of the Polish General Staff.
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