Colours for the Polish Army in France

On 22 June 1918, at the military camp near Mailly in Champagne, colours were presented to the first regiments of the Polish Army in France. The ceremony was attended by the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, the French Foreign Minister and members of the Polish National Committee headed by Roman Dmowski. Some Polish studies place the ceremony at nearby Brienne-le-Château. The colours were funded by French cities. According to regimental histories written after the war, colours from Verdun, Nancy and Belfort were received by the 2nd and 3rd Polish Rifle Regiments and the 1st Field Artillery Regiment.

The President addressed the soldiers: “From now on the sons of Poland will no longer fight under a foreign emblem. From now on they will have their own colours.” Dmowski also spoke. The soldiers took an oath in which they pledged loyalty “to my Fatherland, Poland, one and indivisible” and readiness to give their lives “for the holy cause of its unification and liberation”, and to defend the colours “to the last drop of blood”. For the volunteers, most of them sons of emigrants from America, it was the first Polish standard under which they were to go into battle. As recently as 1914 the French, mindful of Russia’s views, had refused to allow a separate Polish unit, and Polish volunteers had been enlisted in the Foreign Legion.

The army’s oldest regiment was not at Mailly. The 1st Polish Rifle Regiment, formed at the turn of 1917 and 1918, was already at the front in Champagne, south-east of Reims. According to Polish studies, a few days earlier, on 17 June, it had taken its oath at Villers-Marmery and received colours funded by Paris. Some accounts, however, list Paris among the cities whose colours were presented on 22 June. On 18 June, during patrol fighting, Rifleman Jan Rybnowski was killed, regarded as the first fallen soldier of the Blue Army.

The ceremony coincided with the expansion of the army. In June the 1st Polish Rifle Division (PL) began to be formed from these regiments, with the French General Joseph Ecochard as its commander. On 8 July, according to a regimental history published in 1929, the division numbered 227 officers and just over 10,000 other ranks. Most of them were volunteers from the Polish community in America; the rest included Poles from the French army and from Russian units in France, as well as former prisoners from the German army.

Less than three weeks earlier France, Britain and Italy had recognised at Versailles a united and independent Poland as a condition of peace. The ceremony at Mailly showed that the Allies were also taking the Polish army seriously. The Polish National Committee had exercised political direction over it since the agreement of February 1918, but gained full authority only in September, and command was taken over in October by General Józef Haller. In July the 1st Regiment took part in the fighting in Champagne, and the division at full strength reached the front only in the autumn.