their national honour and dignity.
But the real clou of the meeting was the presence of Wanda Wassilewska and Colonel Berling. Wassilewska, tall, dark, more highly strung than ever, exclaimed:
From here, from the Eastern Front we shall break through to Poland, a great strong and just Poland. Polish brethren! Listen to the shots fired on the Eastern Front!...
And shame on those who are urging you to follow a policy of disastrous inactivity!
Colonel Berling, an ugly, burly man with cropped hair, and looking older than his age, said:
The road to our homeland lies across the battlefield, and we, Poles in the Soviet Union, are now taking this road.
In the next two months there were to be many more discussions around the Polish
problem; violent editorials about the London Poles, meetings by the Union of Polish
Patriots, etc. Wolna Polska published more revelations about the high officers of the Anders Army and about Anders himself who, according to Zygmunt Berling, now
Commander of the Kosciuszko Division, had said that he was glad the Polish Army was
being trained on the Middle Volga, because, with the collapse of the Red Army, the Poles could get away to Iran along the Caspian, and then "they could do what they liked".
Berling also said: "What an opportunity Anders missed when he could have thrown one Polish Division into the Battle of Moscow, and failed to do so! " He also referred to General Okulicki, Anders's chief of staff (and later, in 1945, the chief defendant in the Moscow trial of the Polish Right-wing Underground) who
was sabotaging the supply base on the Caspian through which British arms and
food were to come to the Anders Army from Iran... The Polish warehouses at
Teheran were bursting with stuff in 1942—stuff that the British had been sending—
and food was going rotten. But the Anders Command would not allow a single
British rifle, tank or case of food to be sent to Russia, and the supply base was to be used for one thing only—the evacuation of the Polish troops from Russia.
But all this recrimination was becoming ancient history (not, however, ancient history of no consequence), and what was of immediate interest now was the development of
Russian Policy towards the "other" Poland, and, in the first place, the progress of the new Polish Division. I was to see the Kosciuszko Division on July 15, and it was something of a revelation.
The camp of the Polish Division was in a beautiful pine forest, on the steep banks of the Oka river, about two-thirds of the way from Moscow to Riazan. In the surrounding
villages, in that heart of hearts of Great-Russia, it was odd to see soldiers in Polish uniform wearing square confederatka caps, talking to the local inhabitants. No Polish soldiers had ever been anywhere near these parts since 1612, in the days of Ivan Susanin!
However, these were in khaki, and not in the dazzling costumes they wore in 1612, if one is to believe the costume designers of the Bolshoi Theatre!
It was a large camp, with well-built wooden barracks and everywhere there were Polish inscriptions, slogans and symbols. The whole forest was teeming with white Polish
eagles. We arrived there on the night of the 14th, and the 15th was Grünwald Day, when the Kosciuszko Division was to take the oath on the large parade ground. Grünwald was a battle in the Middle Ages which the combined forces of Slavdom—Poles, Russians and
also Lithuanians —had fought against the Teutonic Knights, and by which they had
delayed the Germanic expansion to the east. To the Poles it was what the Battle of the Ice, fought on Lake Peipus by Alexander Nevsky in 1242, was to the Russians. It was
also a great symbol of Slav unity.
On that night of the 14th, there were many guests seated round the supper table in a large army hut: some Russian generals, Commandant Mirlès, representing the French airmen in France, Czech officers—in short, representatives of all the nations fighting on the Soviet-German Front. For reasons of etiquette, or rather for fear of being snubbed, the Poles had not invited any official British or American representatives. A Russian general called Zhukov— only a namesake of the Marshal's, and, according to the London Poles, an
NKVD general—was the principal Russian attached to the Polish division, and had
played a leading part in its training, organisation and equipment.
Many Poles who were later to become familiar figures I saw there for the first time.
Major Grosz—later General Grosz who was to become one of the chief political advisers of the Polish General Staff; Captain Modzelewski, a seemingly modest and quiet little man, who was later to become Polish Ambassador to Moscow and then Foreign Minister;
Captain Borojsza, who was later to become "dictator" of the Polish Press.
And there was a priest there, Father Kupsz, who was said to have been a Polish partisan, and who had recently smuggled himself into Russia. Father Kupsz was a young man with mousey hair and very cagey.
The proceedings on the night of the 14th were presided over by Wanda Wassilewska, and by Colonel Beding.
The next day started with an open-air mass. This was totally unlike the Red Army. An open-air Catholic altar had been erected in an open space in the forest, and Father Kupsz officiated. The altar was decorated with three large panels, one with a symbolic picture of the Christian Faith protected by a Polish soldier, the middle panel showed a Polish eagle, and, below it, a crown of thorns surrounding the figures 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942 and
1943, and with enough room left for one, or, at most, two more dates; the third panel represented a scene of the Nazi terror in Poland. The altar was decorated with flowers and fir-branches and an orchestra of two violins and several brass instruments took the place of the organ. Hundreds of soldiers were kneeling down as they prayed, and later many of them, and scores of auxiliary service girls in khaki, received the holy sacrament. All this in the middle of the pine-forest made a memorable picture.
The most important event of the day was the long march-past of the Kosciuszko Division, preceded by their taking the oath, and the presentation to the Division of its banner with the white Polish eagle on a red-and-white background, inscribed "For Country and Honour" on one side, and a portrait of Kosciuszko on the other. Everywhere, there was a great display of Polish national symbols, and no suggestion that this was in any way a Russian show—except that the Polish spokesmen continuously emphasised their
gratitude to the Soviet Union and the Red Army. In the oath, which, phrase after phrase, thousands of Polish soldiers repeated in chorus, standing there on the parade ground, they swore not only that they would fight to the last drop of blood to liberate Poland from the Germans, but they also swore fidelity to their Russian allies "who had put the weapons of war into their hands". And then the march-past began.
It went on for nearly two hours. On the grandstand decorated with Polish, Russian,
British, American, Czech and French flags, stood Wanda Wassilewska, Berling and other Polish and Russian officers, and Allied representatives. The men were mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five and were in good trim; the officers wore spruce khaki
uniforms and square caps with the Polish eagle; the soldiers wore dark khaki summer
tunics as they marched past, the band playing military marches. The formation of the division had started in April, but the intensive training had not begun till early June. They were not a fully trained division yet, but what had been done was described by French and other Allied representatives as very remarkable. No secret was made of the fact that the division had been trained almost exclusively by Russian officers. But the most