THE THIRTEENTH POINT
[Illustration: Quill pen.]
Paderewski was playing a war relief benefit the next afternoon. He had
played so little except his Chopin since his return to the United States
that he was preparing for the much-heralded Carnegie Hall recital with
even greater care than usual. It was Monday, January 8, 1917.
While he was practicing, a message came from down the street that
Colonel House would like to see him. Very little else would have taken
him away from the piano at that moment, but he was soon in the Colonel's
study.
Colonel House came quickly to the point, as usual. "Next Thursday I am
going to leave for Washington, and I wish to have with me your
memorandum on Poland."
What the Colonel meant was this: he had decided that the time had come
to present President Wilson with a full-scale study of the Polish
situation. What he needed from Paderewski was a memorandum telling
exactly what he wanted for his country and how he thought it should be
accomplished. It was the sort of document that half a dozen trained
diplomats might work over for three weeks!
Paderewski felt as though a large mallet had just thumped him on the
head. "Thursday! But I have my recital tomorrow! And besides, it is
impossible to prepare such a document without the necessary data, and
besides--"
"I must have that memorandum by Thursday morning!"
Paderewski had by this time learned one thing about the Colonel. He
might be a man of few words, but he meant every one of them.
He walked back to his hotel slowly. At all costs, he told himself, he
must keep his wits about him and not panic. During World War II there
was a Seabee slogan that would have appealed to Paderewski, had he heard
it. "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little
longer." He himself operated along these lines. This job was impossible.
It would take a while. He went up to his rooms and began practicing for
four hours.
The program of that Tuesday afternoon recital included the Beethoven C
minor piano sonata, Op. 111. This is one of the most taxing of all the
sonatas in the kind of intellectual demands it makes on the performer.
In addition to the Beethoven he played the Schumann "Butterflies," one
of his favorite recital pieces, and his own piano sonata Op. 21. Shorter
works by Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and his composer-friend Stojowski
completed the program. And as usual in a Paderewski recital, the encores
he played so generously were almost as extensive as the printed program.
Next morning the critics were enthusiastic about the pianist's "bravura
performance." They spoke of the wild delight of the audience which
agreed to go home only after the lights in the hall had been turned off.
It was, in other words, "a typical Paderewski recital audience," wrote
the man from the _Tribune_. In it were "men and women of society,
musicians, and many young persons, even boys and girls who will grow up
to tell their juniors about the time 'when I heard Paderewski.'"
Yet neither the critic nor the boys and girls knew what a fantastic
scene they had just witnessed: Paderewski locked in absolute
concentration on Beethoven and Schumann and the others, while the fate
of his country waited silently for him on his desk.
When the recital was finally over--and he did not deprive the audience
of so much as one bow--he went home and ate dinner. Then he went to work
on the memorandum. Thirty-six hours later--at eight A.M. on Thursday
morning--it was delivered to Colonel House. Paderewski went to bed for
the first time since Monday night.
His fatigue seemed well worth it a week later when the Colonel came back
from Washington. "The President was very much pleased with your
memorandum," he said. "Now get ready. The first shot will be fired very
soon!"
On January 22 President Wilson addressed Congress on "Essential Terms of
Peace in Europe." Paderewski, who was touring in the South at the time,
picked up a newspaper the next day and read these words: "No peace can
last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle
that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand people about from
sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. I take it for
granted ... that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a
united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth
inviolable security of life and worship ... should be guaranteed to all
people who have lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to
a faith and purpose hostile to their own."
The words swam before his eyes. For the first time, the fate of Poland
had been publicly mentioned as an official concern of the United States
government.
On April 2, 1917, President Wilson came to an anguished but inevitable
decision. He called upon the Congress to declare war against Germany.
Full mobilization of the country's manpower was immediately begun. Two
days later, Paderewski, addressing the "Union of Polish Falcons," the
most important Polish-American group, called for the formation of a
separate Polish army, to fight side by side with the Allies. An
independent Polish army, he felt, would prove to the world as nothing
else could that there was truly a Polish nation waiting for its moment
of rebirth. After almost insurmountable difficulties, he finally won his
point, and the governments of France and the United States allowed him
to go ahead with his plans for the formation of the army. Two training
camps for Polish volunteers were founded, and soon twenty-two thousand
Polish-Americans had enlisted in "the Army of Kosciuszko." For help in
transporting so large a number of men to Europe, Paderewski turned to
the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. He, in turn, knew just the
man to assign to the Paderewski case--a young Assistant Secretary named
Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose admiration for the pianist dated from
childhood. With Roosevelt's enthusiastic, red-tape-cutting aid,
Paderewski's volunteers were quickly sent to Europe. There they joined
with the European Poles to form an army numbering nearly one hundred
thousand men, fighting under the banner of the white eagle.
Statesmen who had once believed that Poles could never be united were
now confronted by the fact of a hundred thousand men joined by a common
oath. "I swear before Almighty God, One in Three, to be faithful to my
country Poland, one and indivisible, and to be ready to give my life for
the holy cause of its unification and liberation. I swear to defend my
flag to the last drop of my blood, to observe military discipline, to
obey my leaders, and by my conduct to maintain the honor of a Polish
soldier."
The Polish army paid tribute to Paderewski in a superb and moving way.
His name was inscribed on the membership list of each company. Every day
at roll call, when the name "Ignace Jan Paderewski" was read, one
hundred thousand voices shouted back, "Present!" This honor had been
paid to a soldier only once before in history--to Napoleon. It had never
before been paid to a civilian.
And then at last came the day on which the unselfish labors of the last
three years bore glorious fruit. On January 8, 1918, as the war entered
its last phase, President Wilson spoke to Congress on the peace that lay
ahead. He offered a fourteen point program for what he hoped could be a
just and permanent settlement of the world's disputes. The thirteenth of
these points was this: "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."
As Paderewski read the electric words, he realized that they were taken
almost verbatim from the memorandum he had written for Colonel House
after his Carnegie Hall recital exactly one year before. Paderewski's
work in America had been crowned with a success that not even he, full
of faith as he was, could have imagined.
In Poland, news of the thirteenth point brought life-saving hope to the
hearts of the beleaguered Polish people. On an entirely different level
an earlier incident had already kindled a new flame of courage in the
hearts of the people of Warsaw. It had happened during the final rout of
Russian troops by an advancing German army. To gain time for their
retreat, the Russians blew up the Poniatowski Bridge that spanned the
river Vistula in the very heart of the city. The devastating roar of
dynamite smashed windows and shook buildings for miles around. Even the
solid Zamek shuddered to its foundation stones. The blast almost
uprooted the statues in Palace Square. As the powerful vibrations ripped
past him, King Sigismund tottered but stood firm. Yet even in their
fright the people who ran through the square seeking shelter could not
fail to understand his message. Soon the magical words were flying
through the city. "_Sigismund has shaken his sword!_"
[Illustration: _The warship sped toward Danzig._]
At last the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, brought the
long horror to an end: Paderewski's work in the United States was over,
the greatest tour in his career a complete success. The next step in his
mission would have to be carried out in Paris, where the statesmen of
the world would soon gather to write treaties and to rearrange the
border-lines of Europe.
In Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, Paderewski had a
powerful friend. The experienced statesman now gave him some strong
advice. It was essential, as Paderewski knew better than anyone else,
that Poland be represented at the Conference table. But the Allies would
never recognize a Polish government unless they felt that it truly
represented all factions in Poland. At the moment most Allied leaders
leaned toward Dmowski's Polish Committee in Paris. But others were
asking, "What about Pilsudski?"
What, indeed, about Pilsudski! A hundred times a day the name drifted
across Paderewski's mind like an ominous shadow.
Jozef Pilsudski, the soldier-hero of Poland, had fought his country's
enemies for years on home ground. He had escaped from both Russian and
German prison camps to organize a Polish army and a Polish underground.
At the end of the war he had marched triumphantly into Warsaw and been
acclaimed Chief of State. The government he had organized was strongly
socialist, almost communist in character. It represented the left-wing
factions in Poland, just as Dmowski's Polish National Committee
represented the right-wing factions. Naturally the peace negotiators
would not do business with both groups.
"Someone," Balfour said, "must unite these factions. Someone must go
into Poland and persuade Pilsudski to cooperate with Dmowski to form a
government that is truly representative of all Poles." Obviously there
was only one man in the world who had any hope at all of accomplishing
such an assignment.
On Christmas Day the British warship that had carried the Paderewskis
safely through the treacherous mine-infested waters of the North Sea
dropped anchor in Danzig, Poland's ancient seaport.
Danzig was in German territory and the Germans were not in the least
enthusiastic about welcoming the man who was trying as hard as he could
to relieve them of their share of Polish land. In the city of Poznan to
which Paderewski proceeded from Danzig, a procession of school children
carrying Polish flags was fired on by sniping Prussian soldiers. The
windows of Paderewski's hotel room were shattered by flying bullets,
while he himself calmly tied his necktie. Street-fighting between Poles
and Prussians immediately broke out and lasted for three days. "There is
no doubt," Paderewski wrote to Colonel House, "that the whole affair was
organized by the Germans in order to create new difficulties for the
Peace Conference."
But no amount of threats and terrorism could stop the people of Poland
from lining the railroad tracks between Poznan and Warsaw to cheer and
shout and weep tears of joy while they waited in the snow to catch a
glimpse of the man whose name had shone like a beacon of hope for four
devastating years.
Paderewski reached Warsaw on New Year's Eve. The ovation that he
received from the jubilant city was heart-warming, but it was not really
significant. Tens of thousands of people in Warsaw might be parading the
streets in his honor; but the success or failure of his mission depended
on one man alone. On the first day of the hopeful New Year, Paderewski
presented himself at the Belvedere Palace for his first meeting with
Marshal Jozef Pilsudski.