Читать книгу Poles in Kaisers Army On the Front of the First World War - Ryszard Kaczmarek - Страница 12

The specific character of conscription in Prussia, and later in the German Empire, caused foot soldiers to live close to garrisons. For instance, the soldiers of the 12th Infantry Division and the 12th Infantry Reserve Division came from ←24 | 25→Upper Silesia, mainly from the Upper Silesian Industrial Region, as we find in regimental memoirs. Even the members of the rather elite regiment of this division, the 21st Field Artillery Regiment, mostly recruited from “the workers of the Upper Silesian mines and steel mills.”⁴¹ It meant that they belonged to a group of large-scale industrial workers, and the members of the Prussian Army treated them with reluctance because of the great influence of social democracy in this milieu; unjustified fears in the Upper Silesian case as the influence of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Polish Socialist Party of the Prussian Partition was imperceptible. Therefore, after the formation of the 63rd Infantry Regiment, the administration located its barracks in the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Opole and in Lubliniec, so that it could intervene at any time. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Prussian civil administration asked the army to increase the number of the military units on the German-Russian border, as the former feared social upheavals in the region.⁴²

Cavalry conscription was not so strictly associated with the territorial division of the military districts. However, after von Moltke’s military reform, even in this case, the recruits almost exclusively came from the Wrocław area of the VI Army Corps, let alone the group of professional officers. Whereas, especially among line regiments in 1914, for the sake of the mobilization plan, conscription was only limited to the districts in direct neighborhood with garrisons, depending on the deployment of battalions, squadrons, and batteries.⁴³ It allows us to treat soldiers of the Upper Silesian regiments as the representatives of the local communities, just like in the case of Greater Poland, Pomeranian, and East Prussian regiments. The term “Polish regiments” appeared in the Prussian Partition already in the Franco-Prussian War, which referred to regiments mostly formed of Poles as there were no uniform Polish regiments at that time. However, when it comes to ethnic origin, the Poles comprised the majority of these regiments, particularly in Poznań. They were called Katschmarek Regiments (Katschmarkenregimenten).⁴⁴ This name remained in use and popularity in Poznań even during the First World War.⁴⁵ For example, the famous Polish writer Arkady Fiedler mentions the name when thinking of 1915, when suddenly grew the numbers of deserters, those who refrained from military duty, and the hospitalized of real ←25 | 26→or imaginary diseases – they were all called the Katschmareks.⁴⁶ The name was also used during the Second World War, it even appeared in the official German documents as the name for soldiers ethnically Polish but called to arms due to their registration in the third category of the Deutsche Volksliste.⁴⁷

Of course, the available sources allow no precise differentiation of the soldiers of Prussian regiments in terms of their ethnicity, it always was a true mix of regions, nationalities, and denominations. However, we may prove that the soldiers in these regiments were mostly Poles or spoke Polish at least in a few cases before the First World War, not necessarily by only referring to the very principle of conscription.

The nineteenth-century German officers from garrisons in Regierungsbezirk Opole had no doubt that their subordinates talked to each other almost exclusively in Polish. The officers described it explicitly and simply called these soldiers Poles, or so-called Poles, to differentiate them from the Poles who lived in the partitioned lands and emphasizing their lack of German-speaking abilities.⁴⁸ Poor knowledge of German or Polish origin rather did not contribute to the negative opinions about the recruits. The mixed origin of recruits was considered a typical situation in the German Empire, even if it hindered military training.

Until the 1880s and the introduction of education reforms – linked to the bills in the period of Kulturkampf – most taken for granted that the officers needed to teach their soldiers German. However, this need resulted from military necessity, not administrative pressures. Later the need gradually waned because the following generations, since the turn of the twentieth century, spoke German without difficulty after the graduation from folk schools; however, the level of this knowledge still varied greatly.

All the regiment monographs confirm the existence of special nineteenth-century schools for teaching German, which existed at various organizational levels of the Prussian Army. In the 23rd Infantry Regiment of Nysa, the recruits’ complete ignorance of German justified the need for maintaining such institutions for regular soldiers, although this lack did not affect the assessment of their military skills: “The regiment mostly consisted of Polish recruits (polnisches Einsatz) whose training was difficult because the majority spoke no German. However, the recruits were generally skillful and highly resistant to fatigue.”⁴⁹

←26 | 27→

The custom of sermons in Polish by Upper Silesian military chaplains continued until the 1890s, which confirms that the lack of German and sole use of Polish by the recruits were not an issue for the authorities that treated this as a portrayal of the actual situation on the eastern borderlands of Prussia. The authorities realistically assessed that the soldiers from Polish-speaking villages would not understand complicated messages in a foreign language: “The sermon at the mass was in Polish until the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s, that is, until “the Polish” recruits in Nysa sufficiently mastered the German language. The progress of school education made Polish masses no longer necessary.”⁵⁰

We may investigate the moods of the Poles on the basis of their attitudes toward Polish national uprisings in the nineteenth century. There is a huge difference between the involvement of Poles in the struggle for national liberation in Wielkopolska and the frequent indifference to these events among the inhabitants of Upper Silesia or Masuria.

After the outbreak of the November Uprising in 1830, the Prussian administration mobilized more than a thousand soldiers from the Wrocław corps. The person in command was assumed command Field Marshal Count August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, co-author of the Prussian military reform. The army never announced formal mobilization in the Provice of Silesia but gradually increased the number of Upper Silesian troops, which eventually reached its wartime levels; the troops quickly deployed along the Russian border under the pretext of forming a cordon sanitaire against cholera epidemic. The whole action ended terribly, particularly for its commanders. It was not only von Gneisenau who died of cholera but also his well-known chief of staff, Karl von Clausewitz. However, the concentration of Prussian troops finished only in July 1831.⁵¹ Both 22nd and 23rd Infantry Regiments (1st and 2nd Upper Silesian) controlled the border. There was no case of desertion or refusal of service.⁵² I should mention that no military action occurred at the time, so it is not surprising that there were no cases of insubordination in the units governed with Prussian drill.

The situation was different in 1846–1848, when the Prussian army concentrated the Upper Silesian regiments in winter 1846 during the Kraków Uprising to use them in significant pacification of the Polish insurgents. The administration created at the time a mixed unit to be quartered near Mikołów and commanded by Major General von Felden. The unit was to cooperate with Austrian and ←27 | 28→Russian troops in the suppression of the Kraków Uprising. It included the 2nd Silesian Uhlan Regiment of Gliwice and Pszczyna, the 22nd Infantry Regimentof Gliwice, and the 23rd Infantry Regiment of Nysa. The unit marched out on the night of February 24 and 25, first by train and then on foot, only to cross the border and enter Kraków on March 5, already after the insurgents’ capitulation. The Upper Silesian Battalion remained there for a week under formal Austrian command and then, after a short stay near Chrzanów and Trzebinia, it gradually returned to its quarters in July 1846. Meanwhile, the administration demobilized the reserves of the remaining battalions.⁵³

Like in the previous case, no Prussian unit showed signs of lacking discipline, desertion, or reluctance to operate in indigenous Poland area. Even the internment of some insurgents who crossed the Prussian border went smoothly. At the time, the soldiers of the 23rd Infantry Regiment disarmed nearly one hundred insurgents of Kraków Uprising and led them to Koźle to guard the Polish captives.⁵⁴ The German officers only complaint in their memoirs about housing conditions and the nuisance of combat guard duty.⁵⁵ In 1846, squads and platoons operated on patrols on their own, so there were many opportunities for direct contact with the Polish population, especially since the soldiers usually resided in private homes in Kraków and, later, in Chrzanow district.

The housing conditions were not appropriate, [it was] mostly in the very poor huts of Polish peasants that did not always protect from wind and bad weather. Sometimes, there was not even straw in the quarters, and you had to use your own coat as a blanket. Food supply required requisition – insufficient due to the poverty of the local population – or collection from military warehouses at the expense of the Free City of Kraków.⁵⁶

However, the participation of the Upper Silesian regiments in the Greater Poland Uprising of 1848 was no longer limited to guard duty and marches through the Polish lands. The 22nd Infantry Regiment of Gliwice was to suppress the Uprising. When the first skirmishes occurred not far from Krotoszyn, Poles fought on both sides of the conflict.⁵⁷ The Upper Silesian troops later participated in the seizure of Raszków that, after a hard-fought battle with no great losses of the Upper Silesian regiments (two fallen and five wounded soldiers), effected in the routing of the Polish troops (we do not know the number of fallen soldiers ←28 | 29→taken by the retreating Poles) and captivity of fifty-six prisoners; as the preserved report explains, they came “from the most prominent families of the Province of Poznań.”⁵⁸ The 22nd Infantry Regiment of Gliwice also participated in the operation of the Prussian troops from April 30 to May 1, 1848, that ended in the biggest battle of the Uprising: the Battle of Miłosław. The Prussians defended the key road from Nowe Miasto to Miłosław, as they used it to transfer a column of troops against Ludwik Mierosławski. Later, the Upper Silesians cut off the insurgents by the Warta River, from the Russian border. The regiment remained there until May 12, when it received information about the Jarosławiec compromise and disbandment of the insurgent troops. However, the 22nd Infantry Regiment remained in Greater Poland until October, when it received orders to suppress the Lower Silesia riots.⁵⁹ The Greater Poland operations of the Regiment show no mentions of problems due to the Polish origin of soldiers. It was of no importance for the Prussian officers, who trusted their soldiers and took no special precautions to prevent desertion or refusal to participate in combat.

The events of 1863 definitely are the most interesting in the history of Polish Upper Silesian soldiers in the Prussian Army. The January Uprising (1863–1864) caused the entire troops, whose number significantly increased in the meantime, to move to the “Russian-Polish” border. It was a way to prevent “the spread of disturbances on the Prussian side of the border; even though it turned out unnecessary as the disturbances weakened already in the second year of the fight.”⁶⁰ Nevertheless, this was the first occurrence of close low-level cooperation between the Prussian and Russian troops. Joint border operations lasted for more than a year and reverberated in all the war diaries of the Upper Silesian regiments, both the oldest ones (the 22nd and the 23rd)⁶¹ and the newly formed (the 62nd⁶² and the 63rd).⁶³

Upon news of the outbreak of an anti-Russian uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, the cabinet order of February 9, 1863, put the Wrocław corps in combat readiness while about a thousand soldiers of the closest 22nd Infantry Regiment blocked the Prussian-Russian border. By August 1863, the forces of the 11th and 12th Infantry Divisions gradually joined the 22nd and formed two lines. The Prussian-Russian cooperation was no longer limited to the protection of the ←29 | 30→border, as thirty-three years earlier, but it was more direct this time. The officers of both sides regularly contacted each other and exchanged information. On this occasion, they also maintained friendly relations at the level of regiments’ commands, in compliance with the contemporary tradition of a common ethos of professional officers. This rapprochement reached its peak in the 22nd Infantry Regiment after the acceptance of an invitation to a celebration dedicated to the patron of one of the Russian regiments that occurred on the other side of the border, in Częstochowa. What may sound particularly sinister is the description of signing death sentences for Polish insurgents in the background of the party:

All off-duty officers eagerly responded to a friendly invitation from the Russians. Soon, the quartermasters ordered crude wagons for transportation. At the agreed time, they arrived at the designated place for a meeting at the Prussian-Russian border, not far from the customs service near Lubliniec. They were happy to see that many Russian officers already awaited them next to the black-orange-white boundary poles, they offered a warm welcome and comfortable vehicles. The vehicles were low and not too big, drawn by three horses in a Russian way. Colonel Alexander von Stückradt from East Prussia headed this whole long parade while the Cossack regiment watched over its safety. After a two-hour journey through magnificent forests, we arrived at a town located about three miles away. Surrounded by his officers, Colonel von Ehrenroth from Częstochowa cordially greeted us in German as the German brothers in arms. He also belonged to an old-established noble family who resided in the Baltic Sea Provinces since the 1830s. The hosts served us warm food and drinks so that we could warm ourselves after the long journey and, then, we set off to sightsee Częstochowa, with its very interesting splendid monastery. A military orchestra headed this parade to celebrate the regiment’s festive day and our visit. We looked with great acclaim at the sprightly and elegant look of the soldiers and the orchestra with its excellent performance. Only some Russian officers attended the closing dinner. The absent were those who received new ranks for their duty as non-commissioned officers. We became light-headed in the obvious consequence of drinking champagne from glasses. The mood was very lively during conversations in French which did not really resemble any “Parisian” exchanges. After many toasts that particularly emphasized our cordial relations, there was only one moment that cast a gloomy shadow of war on our joy. However, it made an unforgettable impression on the officers of our regiment. I mean the moment when the Russian commandant signed death sentences on the insurgents while holding a glass of champagne in his left hand.⁶⁴

This picture of a drunk Russian officer who signs the death sentences of Polish insurgents of the January Uprising is horrifying for every Polish reader. Yet, it is only a small part of the events of 1863, viewed from the perspective of the ←30 | 31→soldiers of the Prussian regiment. We may rightly attribute this account to the supranational sense of community of professional officers of noble birth, in this case even strengthened by the fact that some of them shared the same origin from the East Prussian German nobility. However, these were Polish Upper Silesians who held guard duty at the border, for whom those events had to be more than dramatic and certainly exceeded a short reflection about the “shadow of war” cast over the otherwise good party. The prospects of possible desertions in the Prussian regiments was not as distant and hard to imagine as in the previous years. Suffice to consider the case of musketeer Grzibiel, described in the annals of the 63rd Infantry Regiment’s history:

Musketeer Grzibiel from the 7th company, born in Wójtowa Wieś in the Gliwice district, served since February 1863 and performed guard duty near the mill (Kunermühle) by the Brynica River on the night of October 12 and 13. Suddenly, a non-commissioned officer from his company appeared; he was fully armed and tried to cross the bridge with Grzibiel on the watch. The 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:

←33 | 34→

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 the training grounds of their sons, which was previously unavailable. In the first period of the First World War, it aroused the enthusiasm and hopes for a quick victory among the young people from the eastern Prussian districts and other German lands.⁷³

The activities that were part of the training of the Polish recruits also resulted from the modernization efforts; that is, the desire to create a modern society capable of waging a future total war with modern technology and military tactics by all the reservists. Although such behavior resulted in general alienation and the abandonment of army’s social functions (Kriegergesellschaft) – today often called “the Prussian soldatesque” – it also contributed to major civilizational ←34 | 35→changes, not necessarily motivated by ideological Pan-Germanism. What was a derivative of these activities was the mutual trust between subordinates and officers typical for a civic army. While analyzing this phenomenon, we must conclude to our astonishment that, before 1914, neither side noticed any contradiction between the German nationalism of a Prussian officer and the Polish language of the Upper Silesian recruit.