Piłsudski had already achieved much of what he had set out to do, by demonstrating that Poland represented a military as well as a moral force, and had no intention of being used to further German plans. He agreed to join the Council of State of the new kingdom as head of the military department, but insisted on explicit guarantees that its forces would not be German ‘colonial troops’ as he put it, and would never be used against the British or the French. The Germans were not prepared to accept this, so Piłsudski resigned. In July 1917 he was arrested. Of the Polish units already raised,most refused to swear the required oath and were disbanded. The men swelled the ranks of the Polish Military Organisation (POW), an underground network set up across the entire area of the Commonwealth by Piłsudski in the previous two years, a silent army which awaited his signal.
Dmowski had left Poland in 1915 and concentrated his efforts on promoting the Polish cause in France and Britain. A number of his colleagues had been engaged in this from the beginning, most notably the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz until his death in 1916, and the pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who had been remarkably successful in the United States. It was largely as a result of his agitation that President Woodrow Wilson made his declaration to the US Senate on 22 January 1917 that ‘Statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland.’
In June 1917 France sanctioned the formation of an allied Polish army on French soil. In September France recognised Dmowski’s National Committee in Paris as a provisional government of the future Poland. Britain, Italy and America followed suit. Thus by the autumn of 1917 there was a Polish government and a Polish army recognised as co-belligerents, if not formal allies, of the Entente, as the Western allies were generally known.
They could only do this because their ally Russia had been shaken by revolution, and Alexander Kerensky’s government had agreed to the principle of an independent Poland. But October brought the Bolsheviks to power. The Russian front collapsed, and the German army was able to occupy the whole area of the Commonwealth. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, sanctioning this state of affairs.
As a protest against this new peace, General Haller led the Second Brigade of the Legions, the last Polish unit fighting for Austria, across the front to join up with Polish units which had left the disintegrating Russian army. Over the next two years units such as these bobbed about on the swell of the Russian Civil War in a desperate effort to maintain their fighting potential for the day they could be used in the Polish cause. They were often defeated or disbanded, and sometimes forced to serve ‘White’ Russian generals at the behest of the Entente. General Haller made his way to Paris and took command of the Polish army being formed there.
The German Kingdom of Poland still had no king, and was ruled by a Regency Council made up of Poles. But even as revolution toppled first the Habsburg and then the Hohenzollern thrones, the Germans and Austrians did not desist from their imperial machinations. The Germans had for some time been fostering the formation of a small ethnic Lithuanian state as a German satellite. They were also encouraging Belorussian nationalists to form a state of their own. Austria was contemplating a Habsburg Kingdom of Ukraine. On 1 November 1918 Ukrainian flags were hoisted on the public buildings of Lwów and regiments of the Austrian army recruited in Ukraine took over the city. Piłsudski’s POW units and the mainly Polish inhabitants fought back and regained control, but they were besieged within a small area. The newly established Lithuania claimed Wilno and areas of the former Grand Duchy, which brought it into conflict with Belorussian nationalists.
On 7 November 1918 the socialist Ignacy Daszyński proclaimed a provisional Polish government in Lublin. On 10 November, the day before the Armistice in the west, Piłsudski was freed from his German jail and arrived in Warsaw. He was met at the station by Zdzisław Lubomirski and Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, who handed over to him the powers of the Regency Council. All over the country his POW and ex-legionaries disarmed German troops and took control. Piłsudski proclaimed to the world that ‘The Polish state has arisen from the will of the whole nation.’