REBIRTH OF A NATION
[Illustration: Statue.]
If a modern "electronic brain" were fed data about every statesman of
the twentieth century and then asked to pick out the two men most
completely opposite and uncongenial, it would without a moment's
hesitation settle on Jozef Pilsudski and Ignace Jan Paderewski. Even
before their meeting each man had a fairly good idea of what the other
man was like. Now for the first time they could size each other up in
person.
Pilsudski, eying Paderewski's elegant clothes and quietly assured
manner, recalled that this man was the darling of a capitalistic society
in whose image he would try to rebuild Poland. Paderewski, noting the
Marshal's rough, purposely shabby uniform, drooping mustaches, and
abrupt, nervous behavior, remembered that this bold revolutionary had
spent most of his adult life in prison, or in hiding, or in working
under cover, always in the shadows of conspiracy. He was the sort of man
who would stop at nothing, including murder, to gain his objective
because he firmly believed that if the end was good, then the means were
unimportant. Yet there was one point of agreement between them,
Paderewski reflected, and surely it was a strong enough basis for
cooperation. Each man, in his own way, loved his country and would
gladly have given his life for her.
By the end of the exhausting interview Paderewski had come to the
conclusion that this was not enough. Pilsudski remained absolutely
unshaken in his refusal to have anything to do with Dmowski's Committee.
Poland, he believed, belonged to the proletariat--the working
man--alone. He would not admit that any other class of people had any
right to be represented in the new government. As to the question of
Allied recognition, he simply brushed it aside. He could take care of
Poland all by himself, he seemed to imply.
It was a frustrating two hours.
The next day Paderewski left for Cracow, convinced that his mission had
failed. But at three o'clock on the morning after his arrival, he was
roused from sleep by a special messenger from Pilsudski. The Marshal, he
was informed, requested his immediate return to Warsaw for further
negotiations.
What could have happened, Paderewski thought, to change Pilsudski's mind
even to this small extent?
What had happened was this: on January 4, representatives of the
American Relief Administration had arrived in Warsaw to study conditions
and to discuss terms with Pilsudski. The starving people of Europe had
good reason to be familiar with the heroic work of the A.R.A. which had
already saved millions of lives during that cruel winter of armistice.
In charge of the mission to Warsaw was Vernon Kellogg, gifted both as a
scientist and an administrator. Somehow he managed to get the point
across to the iron-willed Marshal that if he expected American Relief
supplies and money to feed and clothe the desperate Polish people, he
would have to find a way of cooperating with Paderewski and the Paris
Committee. Faced with so practical a necessity, Pilsudski capitulated
and asked Paderewski to help him form a representative government.
Paderewski himself was named Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign
Affairs. Pilsudski remained "Chief of State." It was a rather
all-inclusive title.
The Americans were as good as their word. Better, in fact, because once
they had reported back to their chief in Paris about the ghastly
conditions in Poland, miles and miles of red tape were instantly cut in
order to rush in the first supplies. Within a few weeks a life-giving
stream of food, clothing, fuel, and medical supplies were pouring
steadily into the country. Even Pilsudski was impressed. The A.R.A did
its best for all suffering countries. But there seemed to be something
special--almost personal--about its feeling for Poland, even though
there was not yet an officially recognized Polish government. The
pianist was a nuisance, Pilsudski must have thought privately, but he
had his uses if his popularity made the Americans so generous.
What Pilsudski did not know was that there was indeed a personal
attitude involved in the work of the American Relief Administration for
Poland. For at the head of the organization was a man with a long
memory--a former Stanford University engineering student who had once
taken a flyer in the business of staging concerts.
Paderewski had completely forgotten that he had once saved a young man
named Herbert Hoover from great financial distress. But Herbert Hoover
had never forgotten it. The $400 debt that had meant so much to the
student and so little to the artist had now been paid a thousandfold.
As Prime Minister of Poland, Paderewski moved his household into the
Zamek. Did he remember the many times that the young music student had
passed the royal palace and prayed for the day when a Polish leader
would once more be in residence there? Perhaps. But Paderewski was too
busy to spend much time reminiscing. The work of forming first a
National Council of a hundred men and then a coalition cabinet of
sixteen was incredibly difficult. In the course of his former career he
had grown accustomed to long, hard work, but it was nothing compared to
this! Poles, as we have seen, were not the easiest people in the world
with whom to do business politically. And complicating life almost
beyond endurance was Pilsudski. The Chief enjoyed long, drawn-out,
usually pointless conferences that accomplished nothing except the
complete exhaustion of the Prime Minister. He enjoyed them most at two
or three o'clock in the morning, preferably just after Paderewski had
finally managed to retire for the night.
"There is a smell of sulphur in the air whenever that man walks into a
room!" Paderewski said, and he looked forward with increasing eagerness
to the day when he could leave Warsaw for Paris and the Conference. What
a joy not to be in the same city as Jozef Pilsudski!
If the full story of Paderewski's accomplishments at the Paris Peace
Conference were told in this book, there would scarcely be room in it
for anything else. The work of the next three months was the climax and
the crowning achievement of his second career.
When Paderewski finally reached Paris, the Conference was in its
eleventh week. His unavoidable delay in Poland, he quickly realized, had
been a costly one. Dmowski had done his best in presenting the Polish
claims. His five hour speech to the delegates was acknowledged as a
masterful and scholarly treatise. But here was Dmowski himself to tell
Paderewski that the Polish questions were all but decided and decided in
the negative! Somehow nothing was going according to plan. Hostility,
open and hidden, dogged his best efforts. "There is nothing to be done
about it," he announced flatly. "Everything is settled." The opposition
of Lloyd George to every one of his points, for example, practically
guaranteed failure. What nation would go against the British leader just
because of a minor issue like Poland?
[Illustration: _Nothing was going according to plan._]
Poor Paderewski, weary from months of trying to establish order in
Pilsudski's peculiar brand of chaos, now realized that he had a
tremendous job of political "fence-mending" to do in Paris. For the
problem was Dmowski himself. The small nations at the Conference--those
whose main business was asking rather than dispensing favors--had to
depend to an enormous degree on influence. And influence was largely a
question of personality. In personality Dmowski was sheer disaster. Not
only did his cold and academic manner do little to win him friends among
the delegates, but his terrible anti-Semitism won him active enemies
among Jewish and non-Jewish delegates alike. And of all the delegates
who hated Dmowski, Lloyd George hated him the most. So irked, in fact,
was the fierce little Welshman that Paderewski's arrival only succeeded
in rousing him to greater heights of anti-Polish feeling. "After all,"
he said, "what can you expect from a country that sends as its
representative a pianist!"
Paderewski decided to start repairing the damage at the very top.
Immediately after his arrival he paid a call on the powerful President
of the Conference, Georges Clemenceau--the "tiger of France."
The present "tiger" met the former "lion" with a ghost of a twinkle in
his stern eyes. "Are you, by chance," he asked solemnly, "a cousin of
the famous pianist Paderewski?"
Paderewski, with equal solemnity, bowed and said, "I am the very man,
Mr. President."
Clemenceau sighed deeply. "And you, the famous artist, have become
merely a Prime Minister! What a comedown!"
The two men laughed as they shook hands warmly. They were off to a good
start.
It was not long before nearly every delegate to the Conference--even
Lloyd George--came to the conclusion that the Polish question must
definitely be reconsidered before any final decision was made.
Paderewski quickly became one of the most admired and therefore
influential men in Paris. He was useful, too, as it developed. President
Wilson and Colonel House sought his help in explaining some American
attitudes to the Europeans, while the European delegates could always
count on him to interpret their feelings for the Americans. More than
any other man in Paris, Paderewski belonged both to the old world and
the new.
"He came to Paris," Colonel House later wrote, "in the minds of many as
an incongruous figure, whose place was on the concert stage, and not as
one to be reckoned with in the settlement of a torn and distracted
world. He left Paris, in the minds of his colleagues, a statesman, an
incomparable orator, a linguist, and one who had the history of Europe
better in hand than any of his brilliant associates."
One of the delegates, a smooth, professional orator, summed it all up
rather nicely after a particularly wonderful speech by Paderewski. "Ah,"
he sighed to a group of his colleagues, "if we could play as Paderewski
speaks!"
The gains that Paderewski eventually won for his country were not all
that he had hoped for, but they were far greater gains than any other
man in the world could have made. They represented, as one statesman put
it, "a triumph of personality." Matters of boundaries, perhaps, left
something to be desired, but these were not the major issue. The
establishment of Poland as a nation, free and independent among the
nations of the world--this was the major issue, and this was finally
brought about on June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was at
last presented to the delegates for their signatures.
[Illustration: _The Treaty of Versailles was signed._]
"What M. Paderewski has done for Poland will cause eternal gratitude,"
wrote Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. "... His career is one that
deserves to be remembered ... by every man to whom love of country and
loyalty to a great cause stand forth as the noblest attributes of human
character."
In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a roar of applause and approval
greeted Paderewski as he stepped forward to sign the treaty for Poland.
No other delegate except those of the "big four" nations received such
an ovation. But Paderewski's ears were accustomed to the sound of
applause, and it was probably the last thing in his mind as he signed.
His whole life had been directed toward this moment. He had worked, he
had prayed unceasingly for the new life of his country. Now it was an
accomplished fact, acknowledged by the whole world, witnessed by a
stroke of his own pen.
Paderewski's career as a statesman was drawing to an end. It lasted only
six months longer, and the half year was a bitter anti-climax. When the
Paderewskis returned to Warsaw they found the atmosphere unbearably
hostile. Now that Pilsudski had "used" his rival to gain Allied support,
he was determined to get him out of the way as quickly as possible.
Growing opposition of the meanest kind blocked Paderewski's attempts to
build an honorable, democratic government for his country. Pilsudski had
little interest in democracy and no interest at all in maintaining the
peace. He yearned for the smell of powder again, and he planned to
strike for further Polish gains by making war on Russia. But first he
must eliminate the peace-loving Prime Minister.
Political intrigue is a merciless game. Paderewski found himself
attacked through the two things he loved most in the world: his faith
and his wife. Anti-clerical feeling ran high among the socialists of the
country. They used Paderewski's staunch and well-known devotion to the
Church to "prove" that he was a "tool" of the clergy and was therefore,
somehow, dedicated to the enslavement of the working man. It was a
fantastic charge from start to finish, but people believe what they want
to believe, and disgruntled elements in the Sejm--the Polish
assembly--eagerly spread the story.
Even more cruel were the charges leveled against Mme. Paderewska, she
who had worked herself almost to the breaking point not only to ease her
husband's arduous life, but to further the cause of Polish relief. She
was accused of undue interference in matters of state, of being a bad
influence on the Prime Minister, of any vindictive thing that could be
thought of to discredit her husband.
A man of Paderewski's moral courage can weather almost any attack made
against him, but the abuse of his wife cut him to the heart. For weeks
he wrestled with his conscience. He was thinking, as usual, first of
Poland; last, of himself. If he stepped aside now, would it not end the
terrible dissensions that rocked the newborn country? But if he did so,
would he not be deserting his country when she needed him, deserting
her, perhaps, out of a selfish, if natural, longing for personal peace?
At last, on December 5, 1919, Paderewski announced his resignation from
office. A few days earlier, at a wildly agitated meeting of the Sejm,
his government had received a vote of confidence, but the vote had been
carried by a very slim majority. Too slim a majority, Paderewski felt,
to represent a true mandate of the people, particularly since one of the
parties that voted against him in the Sejm actually had more followers,
numerically, than any of the parties who voted in his favor. If he
stayed on, nothing could follow but further discord. If he left now,
then surely the country would somehow make her way to internal peace and
unity.
Paderewski generously agreed to the panic-stricken request of the Sejm
that he try to form a new cabinet. Then he quietly left Warsaw, and
after five years of voluntary exile returned to his beloved home on the
shining Swiss lake.