Misused Decades
BITTER GLORY: Poland and its Fate, 1918-1939 by Richard M. Watt '52 Simon & Schuster, 1979. 511 pp. $16.95
One of the nobler connotations, among some condescending ones, of the term "amateur historian" should be that of a perceptive and reasonably discriminating beneficiary of published professional research, who has the gift of writing tersely and lucidly for a general public. Richard Watt, who has several widely respected volumes on phases of World War I in Europe to his credit, here does justice in this sense to the history of Poland in the quarter century between 1914 and 1939. It presents a skein of events more grimly revealing of the promise and performance of those misused two decades of a precarious peace-a 20-year armistice as Fouch prophetically called it-than the fortunes of any of the smaller and less ambitious "successor states" of Versailles. It is a tangled story of heroism, hybris mediocrity, and opportunities missed, now" by the Poles, now by the ex-allies of 1914-1918, to make sense of a post-war settlement not nearly as unjust cynical, or shortsighted as its enemies and critics liked to maintain.
Poland, as Watt's account well demonstrates, was a part of the Versailles legacy in which the deep flaws of West-European inter-war policies-inconsistency, moral exhaustion, and cowardice, fascist leanings abetted by childish terror of "Bolshevism"-were most repellently in evidence and came to the most tragic head in 1939. But for this failure of vision and energy, the 20-year history of Polonia Restituta the reborn Polish Commonwealth, might have been just an early part of the success story of a viable European security system, economic and political-with Poland and its natural ally Czechoslovakia at its center and the two forces of disequilibrium (to put it mildly), Germany and the USSR, held at bay, without ostracism or other detriment, by a vigilant Britain and France. What really happened instead, within and around the new Poland, does not lack by now for broad professional treatments. But a popular book of scope and merit had not come to this reviewer's attention before Richard Watt's highly creditable account.
The work is not without its shortcomings. Most, one suspects, have to do with what is evidently at best a rudimentary command of Polish sources. Watt's bibliography and acknowledgements refer almost exclusively to English writings, and in the Polish titles, names, and political acronyms he cites there are more misspellings and small blunders than can easily be attributed to copy editors and typesetters alone. Other features of the book are more disturbing on the scores of balance and civic judgment. Fully two fifths of BitterGlory-a fine title, incidentally-deals with the military and political stages by which Poland's borders were settled: World War I, Versailles, the Silesian plebiscites, the recapture of the Wilno district from Bolshevik occupation in 1919, and the-admittedly arresting-Stalingrad-caliber disaster inflicted by Marshal Pilsudski upon the Soviet armies in the war of 1919-21. The author also makes less than he should have of the systematic repression practiced by the Pilsudski regime and its heirs against trade union and left party leaders. Although the Polish governments were, of course, rank dilettantes at the Gulag game, in the infamous isolation camp of Bereza Kartuzka many hundreds of potential builders and mentors of a fully democratic Poland were buried alive, some for a decade or more, until the war delivered them to the deadlier mercies of the Soviet NKVD
Such shortcomings are outweighed, however, by the solid virtues of this book. It offers a fluent, sympathetic, and on the whole judicious introduction to its subject, supported by an excellent printing job and a modicum of illustrative materials. One would gladly see Watt extend his account to the even bitterer glories earned for Poland by her unexampled sacrifices for national freedom in World War I, and by her disproportionate contributions to an Allied victory which for her, once again, ended in betrayal.
A Dartmouth professor of Russian languageand literature since 1966, Walter Arndt was agraduate student in Warsaw in 1939. He servedin the Polish Army and the underground beforeescaping to Istanbul in 1940.
