Poles in Kaisers Army On the Front of the First World War. Ryszard Kaczmarek

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СКАЧАТЬ non-commissioned officer halted only when he heard a call: “Stop! Who is there?” Then, the officer introduced himself. The Musketeer Grzibiel, who only spoke Polish, asked further questions to check whether the non-commissioned officer acted under an official order. The officer said that he was going to patrol. However, Musketeer Grzibiel did not believe him. He arrested the officer who already started to load his rifle. Later, it turned out that the officer wanted to desert to Russia due to the bad performance of his function. For his foresight and unhesitant actions, Musketeer Grzibiel was promoted to the rank of Private First Class [Gefreiter].⁶⁵

This peculiar story of an exclusively Polish-speaking Upper Silesian – promoted, Grzibiel stayed in the regiment for good until his death during the war with Austria in 1866 – who arrests another Upper Silesian for desertion shows the complexity of national attitudes in this region, where not only language determined the local inhabitants. However, it also proves the processes of socialization and denationalization that occurred during military duty in the Prussian regiments. During the January Uprising and despite incidental cases of such insubordination, the Upper Silesian regiments remained at the border until the very end. It was only in January 1864, when the situation in the Kingdom of Poland was under control insofar that it allowed for the reduction of security measures, and the 22nd Infantry Regiment could return to the garrison and partly demobilize. Only the 2nd Battalion of this regiment temporarily remained in the Lubliniec sector as an outpost until the end of April 1864. Zeissing, the regiment’s doctor in the garrison hospital in Katowice, took care of the five Russian soldiers ←31 | 32→heavily injured during the fights with the Polish insurgents and nursed them back to health wherefore he received the Order of Saint Stanislaus of the third class in September 1864.⁶⁶

It seems that loyalism (to the state) spread both in the Upper Silesian regiments and the Katschmarek Regiments of Pomerania and Greater Poland. We may explain the loyalism by the tendency to adapt prevalent throughout Central and Eastern Europe even among the nations and ethnic groups that claimed special rights to use own language as official or even administrative autonomy. Nevertheless, mass-scale cases of irredentism were rare before 1914. The minorities behaved loyally even in the army of the multinational Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which is often perceived as the model of the decomposition of an eminent power due to accumulating problems of national disloyalty especially among the Slavic. Rok Stergar analyzes the attitude of Slavic countries toward Austrio-Hungarian universal conscription and interprets this phenomenon not as the result of blind legitimism but pragmatic conformity.⁶⁷ This term recently grows in popularity in the context of civic attitudes the nineteenth- and twentienth-century Central and Eastern Europe, especially in the borderlands, which best reflects the matter of the complex Upper Silesian behaviors. There is no room for “Prussian nationalism” that stemmed from loyalism to the House of Hohenzollern; it was an adjustment to the existing conditions. The limit for such opportunism was the inviolability of the most important values of traditionalist communities: religion and language. Despite Kulturkampf, the army sought no conflict in this field so the idea of attachment to “one’s own” regiment survived in Upper Silesia. Men hanged portraits from the period of military duty with pride, combatant unions were popular, and many celebrated anniversaries of nineteenth-century battles; particularly the 1870 Battle of Sedan.

However, such attitude was often put to a hard test in contact with officers almost exclusively from proper Prussia or Germany. The officers often referred to the popular motif of their civilizational superiority over the Polish-speaking population. Some of the idealistic Prussian commanders directly spoke about the necessity of spreading culture in the East. The famous concept of “the bearer of culture” (Kulturträger) appeared infrequently, but we easily find descriptions of German superiority over others at the time. This is how we should interpret the ←32 | 33→behavior of Colonel von Goszicki, who welcomed the Polish recruits as people “physically and spiritually handicapped.”⁶⁸ However, this expression of utter contempt for another nation did not only result from the evaluation of the national traits of Poles. It primarily stemmed from the mission “to enlighten the recruit” that functioned in the armies formed by universal conscription. Such view lives to this day in many European armies – also Polish – as a humorous transformation of “the civilian into a human.” We frequently find all manner of simplified beliefs about the slow-witted conscript from a village in such nineteenth-century stories: the lack of hygiene, long hair, and unrestrained tendency to drink vodka are to be his typical attributes. The second part of the same description emphasizes the positive features of the Polish recruit after training, which proves that this contempt did not refer to all Poles on face value.⁶⁹

      A Prussian officer in the regiment primarily emphasized the training of his soldiers. He was inspired by the apotheosized Clausewitz, so the officer perceived his duty is to build a modern well-trained army, capable of participating in total war. In the opinion of Prussian officers, the Poles met those criteria not after the process of denationalization, but after the imposition of other civilizing norms. This was the real goal of the activities of German commanders: military training based on mutual understanding, impossible without learning the German language; self-reliance on the battlefield; trust for the superiors; and general education, increasing often required by modern military tactics, particularly among the non-commissioned officers.

These actions constituted no harassment but simply formed the necessary element of social modernization, effectively implemented through universal conscription. Inspired by idealistic German philosophy, some Prussian officers regarded the modernizing task not only as duty but also a mission that was to enable the promotion of at least the gifted part of their subordinates who quickly achieved the ranks of non-commissioned officers.⁷⁰ The army was a good place for these people to complete the necessary general education. Therefore, the regiments had elementary schools with additional military subjects. The recruits received lessons on many levels. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the 23rd Infantry Regiment possessed as many as ten such institutions, which constituted a coherent educational system:

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Ten different schools in the regiment started education on November 1 and worked in the same way…. The Nysa school taught soldiers in two classes counting, reading, writing, spelling, stylistics, geography, and history. The best students also received introduction to geometry. Whereas the first battalion gathered the best non-commissioned officers from all units to be promoted to the rank of sergeant [Feldwebel], who learned mathematics, geography, German language, and writing letters. Moreover, the majority of young soldiers already learned reading, writing, and counting in their companies, under the supervision of officers and sergeants.⁷¹

The circumstances forced the Prussian authorities to implement such procedures. If the majority of recruits in these regiments came from Polish-speaking areas, it was only natural that to train these non-commissioned officers because they were more likely to reach their subordinates. In turn, it meant social advancement for many of the recruits. This group included regimental or even divisional writers who later often continued work as officials at lower posts.⁷²

No wonder that the fascination with German military power on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War grew in popularity as a result of paramilitary associations’ activities and press propaganda among the youth. The breakthrough was visible in the grand celebration of the centenary of success over the Napoleonic army, treated as the German national liberation war. According to the memoirs of Arka Bożek, then happened a change of attitude toward the Polish recruits even in the army. The barracks became open so that families could finally visit СКАЧАТЬ